On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 20:27 -0400, Pascal Bruno wrote: > How come MagicJack is still around? >
they no longer say unlimited, their TOS says 20 times average usage, and per someone on the inside average usage is 104 mninutes. So basically its $2/mo (prepaid up front) for 2000 minutes a month. In addition to that they do extensive LCR with highly questionable routes, they profit off the sale of the adapters. If you use the service for a couple months then walk away they still have your money. Ymax (parent company) bought out tigerjet or something who makes the chip that drives the magicjack adapter (you can use it for skype or anything else hte TJ adapters are good for). They also own a clec and I dont know if they are getting compensated for inbound or not, but they could be. When you call "international" they have fairly high rates compared to other providers. I also dont know how much of this is a loss leader to get market share. Skype offered free calling for a while. Google voice now offers free calling. Skype is about $3/mo for 10,000 minutes (they say unlimited then in the TOS define unlimited as 10,000 minutes). I do not know if they are operating under a pyramid type bubble now or not, because people pay up front it may be that some of the annual fee money is used for this months operating expenses, meaning once the growth stops at an ever increasing rate they will collapse. Then again it could be that they are profitable when you get into the totality of their revenue streams. I believe that they place advertisements in the dialer, and because they modified the way that the md5 hash is done you cant use standard sip software (unless you are clever, figure it out which is not hard with IDApro, and write a proxy). There is a perl proxy that exists but it forces all traffic to the same proxy, mine uses iptables to pass it to a perl script which does the magic that is required and sends it to whatever proxy was configured. This means that you can use standard sip stuff again. The other perl proxy that forwards stuff to the same sip proxy is out there somewhere, it was forwarded to me at one time after I did mine so I dont know where it is specifically. With all of that said, it is not hard to charge people $2/mo for 100 minutes, that works out to about 2 cents a minute for the average customer which is quite profitable by in large. Please note that magicjack does not sell outbound telephone service (clever contract wording). They sell inbound service only. The outbound service is free and they can take it away at any time as a result. -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel pgp key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8AE5C721 _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- AstriCon 2009 - October 13 - 15 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
