I wonder what we should start calling the new telcos. There are 3
international companies that control nearly all of telcom today.
Verizon/MCI, SBC that bought Cingular/ATT, and Sprint/Nextel. They
aren't Bell Operating Companies. They are really big, mostly unchecked
mega-telcos. RBMTs.. :-)
Peter R. wrote:
The margin in consumer VOIP is disappearing. The costs of the
infrastructure including DIDs and 911 implementation have slammed the
industry. Read Vonage's IPO to better understand the 911 liability and
cost.
In a couple of cases I have consulted on, the local CO was not
accessible by any CLEC, so no LNP, so no one to outsource the VOIP to.
BOCs have learned that most consumers switch to VOIP for cost savings,
so have lowered their costs. Plus cableco's have gotten into the game
(and can do 911) and bundle on one bill.
You can try to do it yourself (and Asterisk is a GREAT tool for this),
but if you aren't a CLEC, how do you handle 911 and LNP?
Now if you wanted to sell Hosted PBX to Businesses, that's valuable.
Regards,
Peter
RAD-INFO, Inc.
Mark Koskenmaki wrote:
I don't understand your point about "selling on margins".
I was merely asking for a "wholesale" product that was priced less than
RETAIL.
Nothing more, nothing less.
I have yet to figure out how it is all the "wholesale" products are
currently anywhere between 10 and 100% more than the current retail
offerings.
There's no "margin" in that, unless I'm supposed to subsidize VOIP
service
with my WISP revenue, which is the reverse notion of more revenue per
customer.
I didn't say I wanted a "fat" margin. I just said I wanted something I
could bundle with my data service that didn't cost me more than
retail to
get, which is why I'm a bit taken back at the notion that wholesale
costs
more than retail.
If that' whining, in your view, I'd say your view was a little
strange. As
best I can tell, the biggest costs for VOIP are the infrastructure and
customer service. I merely wanted to make the unusual split of
dealing
with customer service myself, but farming out the infrastructure.
Nobody
seems to be interested in doing that, and I'm not sure why. Lots of
ISP's are outsourcing customer service, and seemingly it has
advantages, one
would naturally assume this is true of the VOIP business, but, hey,
maybe
not. The infrastructure, as best I can tell, is the most cost
effective to
scale upwards, more so than customer service.
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