Hmmmmm, makes sense. On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Trixter aka Bret McDanel < [email protected]> wrote:
> 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 >
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