On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 22:56 -0700, Douglas Garstang wrote: > So, I have a general question. > > What billing increments do ITSP's who terminate SIP->PSTN normally > bill in? > > We've been using carriers that bill 1/1, and the quality hasn't been > too good, lots of 503's etc. We just started testing with someone else > that offers much better ASR's (they failover internally between qwest, > global crossing etc), but they bill 30/6. According to THEM, only > companies that can't offer top quality routes bill 1/1. > > What's the deal here? Is this true?
First, does it really matter? How many calls do you make that are less than 30 seconds? Will the 6 second increment really affect your total price? If the new price is higher, is the quality worth it? I am unsure if there is a relation between billing increments and quality, but ok. As for what a provider bills at that is up to the provider itself. This may be passed on from the carriers they are using to terminate calls. Generally on the PSTN (at least in the US) you will see a higher first minute and lower additional minutes. This is because to set up the call a few queries have to be made which cost the carriers money. Even if the phone isnt answered there are these costs. So what they do is charge a higher first minute to recover these costs and when the phone is never answered they write that off into other costs which is paid for in part by that first minute and each additional minute. Now most residential service in the US is billed in whole minute increments while many business plans are 6 second increments. Really there isnt any reason for them to not be each second increments. For short duration calls a higher billing increment is more profitable, which means that other costs can be absorbed by that. Since few PSTN based carriers offer 1/1 billing (I think this is changing though) on most plans it may be true that you cant do 1/1 with quality carriers as a general rule. I do not however believe it to be an absolute rule, and again there is cost vs quality. Its very likely that their carriers are doing 30/6 or 6/6 to them, which are (or at least were) very common business billing plans. I dont know why they did 6 seconds, the carriers claimed it had something to do with the way that duration was calculated over a decade ago, that the systems would not let them do 1/1. I didnt believe it then, and certainly now its not true, or if it is there is no real reason for it to be true (intercarrier settlements are often enough millisecond resolution showing that it doesnt have to be true). Most of this is just to bill for "slack time", and it extends far beyond this, telecom USA did that 1010220 or whatever, 99 cents for the first 20 minutes, 5 cents there after. Well if you do the math, its 5 cents for each minute, unless you hang up before 20. They relied on the slack time for profit (this plan is many years old, it may be cheaper now). > -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel Belfast +44 28 9099 6461 US +1 516 687 5200 http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you! _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
