Alex Balashov wrote:
The right thing to do, in theory, would be to charge your customers enough for LD that it doesn't really matter much. But practically speaking, this is often impossible due to the marketing requirements of today's competitive environment, e.g. price collapse in wholesale LD, "unlimited" long-distance plans touted by ILECs to try to slow down the decline of land-line subscribers, etc.
I was unclear. It's not that we block them, it's that the calls quite often fail to complete through all our carriers. We call that carrier and they give us the usual "limited IXC capacity" line for the number. Most of these things are hosted in small towns where the arbitrage is profitable, so they built the capacity without the idea that they'd have thousands of conference calls coming in. I'd consider taking a hit on the cost if it stopped people calling us, but first I'd have to find the carrier(s) that can actually get the calls there to start with. We educate the customers who call, and most often simply reminding them that they get a free conference service with us is all they need. We obviously need to do a better job letting them know that it's included. So anyway the problem isn't the calls themselves, but us having to waste time fielding support calls. BTW, the carrier that we most often send those calls to and fail most often is Commpartners, if anyone cares. -- Carlos Alvarez TelEvolve 602-889-3003