[VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck

[Paul Stamoulis]

Int’l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried – 215k of unique rating/routing options or “breakouts” as known in the industry, is not too bad.

You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.

You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another – I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.

You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That’s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.

As far as the mark-up on rates, don’t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int’l sales, well that’s a whole other subject that gets much more complex… good luck,

Paul Stamoulis    +1 212 444 3003     Onestopcorp – thousands of technology solutions... just one call!

Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/


From: VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> On Behalf Of Shripal Daphtary
Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM
To: VoiceOps at voiceops.org
Subject: [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck

Hey group,

I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for.  It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff.   We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR.  Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl.  Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.

I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this?   Are there any best practices?

The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin?  Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004.  Your rate  would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing.  We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever.  however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.

Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?


Thanks !

Shri
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