[VoiceOps] No-commit international calling

[Dovid Bender]

TLDR; Global routing is getting messier and messier. Get a few carriers in
route for intl calls. Anything other than a BUSY should fail to the next
carrier in route.

Global routing has been a cluster **** as of lately. Two issues have risen
as of late. The first is countries cracking down on spam traffic. Lots of
countries (Australia, UK etc.) are forcing carriers to watch the traffic
coming in a lot closer. The second is the rates. A few years back the EEA
put in regulation that inter EEA calls need to be charged the same low
rates. The carriers started a two tier billing system. If the CLI was in
the EEA it was the lower rate and if the CLI was non EEA it was billed at a
higher rate, there were some exceptions. This set off a chain reaction.
South Africa was next. Wholesale was about 0.025 per minute for Mobile.
Overnight inter SA calls were charged the same while calls from outside SA
were charged at 0.16 per minute. In SA they were more strict and spoofing
CLI didn't help. It took about 1-2 years for the routes to stabilize. Tier1
carriers had GSM gateways in route (we proved this by using iTest). Carrier
started spoofing CLI to EEA countries with a local number (e.g. if they
called Germany they made up a number that started with 49). This led the
German carriers to charge a higher rate if calls to Germany came with a
local CLI (it's still cheaper if the CLI is from another EEA Country). The
Israeli carriers recently started charging an extra 0.10 per minute if the
calls come from out  of the country. This led the UK carriers to raise
their rates. Where the CLI to UK calls is Israeli, they started  charging
0.30 per minute. Currently BICS has more route exceptions for pricing than
they do have actual routes.  There is a lot more here and I can talk for
hours on the subject.

Carriers want to advertise/offer the best route to win your business. So
say Cyprus cost 0.10 per minute for non EEA CLI, if a carrier has a GSM
gateway option that costs them 0.02 per minute they will issue you a rate
of say 0.3 per minute and if the GW is busy simply reject your calls. This
they they win whatever traffic you have going to them based on your A-Z
routing. I would tell you to look at:
Voxbeam
IDT (Net2Phone) - Ask them for their platinum rate deck, I would not go any
lower.

My 9-5 is the equiv of a CLEC in Cyprus and our "specialty" is getting good
quality routes. If the others don't work free to email me off list and I
can try to help out.


On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 3:34 PM Ross Tajvar via VoiceOps <
voiceops at voiceops.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have an asterisk PBX for personal/business use. I use Flowroute for both
> origination and termination.
>
> Recently I've started needing to make some international calls
> (specifically mostly to the UK, but also some other places in Europe and
> Australia). There've been a few numbers where completion is very
> hit-or-miss, and a few that seem not to work at all (in both cases I get a
> SIP 500 back from the carrier).
>
> I'm wondering if this is a carrier issue - maybe Flowroute just has
> low-quality routes to some destinations? I'd like to try other carriers,
> and ideally keep a second one as a fallback, but I'm not sure who's out
> there with no commit.
>
> Looks like voip.ms is one option. Does anyone have any other suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
> Ross
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