Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group, I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that. I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices? The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target. Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this? Thanks ! Shri
Shri, International is a mess. I gave a talk about it at Astricon in 2017 [1]. For instance what one carrier calls mobile another carrier may call landline. If you are reselling minutes what you really need is a billing platform such as JeraSoft or A2Billing where you upload all of your carriers routes and rates so you know what your costs are. You then need to come up with a routing table based on your carriers routes to give to your clients. Most billing systems will allow you to set either a set rate for a destination OR a % based markup. This can be tricky as if your rates one day go up or down the rates to your clients will change without you telling them. For this reason we set set static rates and then run reports to make sure the margins are in an acceptable range. Lastly cheapest isn't always best. People in the US taking call completion for granted. In general the cheaper you go the more FAS and other issues you will have. Regards, Dovid [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMmT0lp6nZY On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:10 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad. You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money. You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent. You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients. As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck, Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call! Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ From: VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> On Behalf Of Shripal Daphtary Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM To: VoiceOps at voiceops.org Subject: [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck Hey group, I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that. I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices? The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target. Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this? Thanks ! Shri
Thanks Paul and Dovid -- I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more. I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure. On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>*
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
Another annoyance to watch out for is all codes from various carriers won't match up. For example UK Landlines. Some carriers will say country code 44 is landlines and give you a rate, then break out 447XXX for the mobiles. Others will give a rate for 441 and 442. Then some will give a rate for 442, 4420, 44203, 44207 or some combination of those which they should all end up being compressed to 442. So your LCR has to do the longest prefix match per carrier and then compare against carriers. Not necessarily shortest prefix match. For example: Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085 The obvious LCR is carrier A, but the last time I tested A2Billing, it would say Carrier C is the winner because the rest of the carriers don't have a rate for 44207. The other LCR option at the time would do shortest prefix match which could cause issues with mobile calls being incorrectly routed and rated. Things may have changed as my experience with A2Billing was many years ago, but it should apply to LCR calculations in general. On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:24 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Paul and Dovid --
I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more.
I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well
We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>*
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
this is all so annoying b/c we do so little international, On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 1:57 PM Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
Another annoyance to watch out for is all codes from various carriers won't match up. For example UK Landlines. Some carriers will say country code 44 is landlines and give you a rate, then break out 447XXX for the mobiles. Others will give a rate for 441 and 442. Then some will give a rate for 442, 4420, 44203, 44207 or some combination of those which they should all end up being compressed to 442. So your LCR has to do the longest prefix match per carrier and then compare against carriers. Not necessarily shortest prefix match. For example:
Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085
The obvious LCR is carrier A, but the last time I tested A2Billing, it would say Carrier C is the winner because the rest of the carriers don't have a rate for 44207. The other LCR option at the time would do shortest prefix match which could cause issues with mobile calls being incorrectly routed and rated. Things may have changed as my experience with A2Billing was many years ago, but it should apply to LCR calculations in general.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:24 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Paul and Dovid --
I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more.
I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well
We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>*
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
So, use a hassle-free solution and let someone else set it up for you. Not that we would know anything about that. :-) On Tue, Jun 04, 2019 at 02:29:15PM -0400, Shripal Daphtary wrote:
this is all so annoying b/c we do so little international,
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 1:57 PM Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
Another annoyance to watch out for is all codes from various carriers won't match up. For example UK Landlines. Some carriers will say country code 44 is landlines and give you a rate, then break out 447XXX for the mobiles. Others will give a rate for 441 and 442. Then some will give a rate for 442, 4420, 44203, 44207 or some combination of those which they should all end up being compressed to 442. So your LCR has to do the longest prefix match per carrier and then compare against carriers. Not necessarily shortest prefix match. For example:
Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085
The obvious LCR is carrier A, but the last time I tested A2Billing, it would say Carrier C is the winner because the rest of the carriers don't have a rate for 44207. The other LCR option at the time would do shortest prefix match which could cause issues with mobile calls being incorrectly routed and rated. Things may have changed as my experience with A2Billing was many years ago, but it should apply to LCR calculations in general.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:24 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Paul and Dovid --
I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more.
I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well
We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>*
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
-- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC Tel: +1-706-510-6800 / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/
I know of carriers that don't even bill clients for calls because of the hassle. How many minutes are you doing a month and what is your setup? You may want to hand it off to a third party and bill based in the ANI. On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 2:29 PM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
this is all so annoying b/c we do so little international,
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 1:57 PM Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
Another annoyance to watch out for is all codes from various carriers won't match up. For example UK Landlines. Some carriers will say country code 44 is landlines and give you a rate, then break out 447XXX for the mobiles. Others will give a rate for 441 and 442. Then some will give a rate for 442, 4420, 44203, 44207 or some combination of those which they should all end up being compressed to 442. So your LCR has to do the longest prefix match per carrier and then compare against carriers. Not necessarily shortest prefix match. For example:
Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085
The obvious LCR is carrier A, but the last time I tested A2Billing, it would say Carrier C is the winner because the rest of the carriers don't have a rate for 44207. The other LCR option at the time would do shortest prefix match which could cause issues with mobile calls being incorrectly routed and rated. Things may have changed as my experience with A2Billing was many years ago, but it should apply to LCR calculations in general.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:24 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Paul and Dovid --
I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more.
I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well
We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis < pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>*
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
If you're using Thinq for international and don't want to deal with LCR and generating rates for just a small amount of traffic, build a Verizon International only trunk with them and push all your traffic out there. You probably won't run into many issues. The slightly higher rates will be easier than dealing with the management headaches. Verizon does a really good job about keeping FAS out from the areas I've used them on. On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:29 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
this is all so annoying b/c we do so little international,
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 1:57 PM Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
Another annoyance to watch out for is all codes from various carriers won't match up. For example UK Landlines. Some carriers will say country code 44 is landlines and give you a rate, then break out 447XXX for the mobiles. Others will give a rate for 441 and 442. Then some will give a rate for 442, 4420, 44203, 44207 or some combination of those which they should all end up being compressed to 442. So your LCR has to do the longest prefix match per carrier and then compare against carriers. Not necessarily shortest prefix match. For example:
Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085
The obvious LCR is carrier A, but the last time I tested A2Billing, it would say Carrier C is the winner because the rest of the carriers don't have a rate for 44207. The other LCR option at the time would do shortest prefix match which could cause issues with mobile calls being incorrectly routed and rated. Things may have changed as my experience with A2Billing was many years ago, but it should apply to LCR calculations in general.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:24 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Paul and Dovid --
I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more.
I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well
We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis < pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>*
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
I need to get whatever Verizon link your using. We have multiple trunks with them (SIP & SS7) in Europe and as of late it's been hit or miss. On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 5:43 PM Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
If you're using Thinq for international and don't want to deal with LCR and generating rates for just a small amount of traffic, build a Verizon International only trunk with them and push all your traffic out there. You probably won't run into many issues. The slightly higher rates will be easier than dealing with the management headaches. Verizon does a really good job about keeping FAS out from the areas I've used them on.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:29 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
this is all so annoying b/c we do so little international,
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 1:57 PM Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
Another annoyance to watch out for is all codes from various carriers won't match up. For example UK Landlines. Some carriers will say country code 44 is landlines and give you a rate, then break out 447XXX for the mobiles. Others will give a rate for 441 and 442. Then some will give a rate for 442, 4420, 44203, 44207 or some combination of those which they should all end up being compressed to 442. So your LCR has to do the longest prefix match per carrier and then compare against carriers. Not necessarily shortest prefix match. For example:
Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085
The obvious LCR is carrier A, but the last time I tested A2Billing, it would say Carrier C is the winner because the rest of the carriers don't have a rate for 44207. The other LCR option at the time would do shortest prefix match which could cause issues with mobile calls being incorrectly routed and rated. Things may have changed as my experience with A2Billing was many years ago, but it should apply to LCR calculations in general.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:24 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Paul and Dovid --
I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more.
I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well
We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis < pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>*
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
I used Verizon's US based SIP trunks. Not using them currently though due to not being able to get ahold of our account manager. I believe they have multiple quality tiers. On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 2:45 PM Dovid Bender <dovid at telecurve.com> wrote:
I need to get whatever Verizon link your using. We have multiple trunks with them (SIP & SS7) in Europe and as of late it's been hit or miss.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 5:43 PM Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
If you're using Thinq for international and don't want to deal with LCR and generating rates for just a small amount of traffic, build a Verizon International only trunk with them and push all your traffic out there. You probably won't run into many issues. The slightly higher rates will be easier than dealing with the management headaches. Verizon does a really good job about keeping FAS out from the areas I've used them on.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:29 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
this is all so annoying b/c we do so little international,
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 1:57 PM Jared Geiger <jared at compuwizz.net> wrote:
Another annoyance to watch out for is all codes from various carriers won't match up. For example UK Landlines. Some carriers will say country code 44 is landlines and give you a rate, then break out 447XXX for the mobiles. Others will give a rate for 441 and 442. Then some will give a rate for 442, 4420, 44203, 44207 or some combination of those which they should all end up being compressed to 442. So your LCR has to do the longest prefix match per carrier and then compare against carriers. Not necessarily shortest prefix match. For example:
Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085
The obvious LCR is carrier A, but the last time I tested A2Billing, it would say Carrier C is the winner because the rest of the carriers don't have a rate for 44207. The other LCR option at the time would do shortest prefix match which could cause issues with mobile calls being incorrectly routed and rated. Things may have changed as my experience with A2Billing was many years ago, but it should apply to LCR calculations in general.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:24 AM Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Paul and Dovid --
I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more.
I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well
We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis < pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>*
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
Do you have a way to NOT route calls that are losing money? That would solve the ?underwater rate? problem?. Otherwise, you really can not do wholesale at all? Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call! Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ From: Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2019 1:24 PM To: Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> Cc: VoiceOps at voiceops.org Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck Thanks Paul and Dovid -- I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more. I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure. On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net<mailto:pstamoulis at onestoptel.net>> wrote: Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad. You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money. You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent. You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients. As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck, Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call! Please connect at https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/ From: VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org<mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org>> On Behalf Of Shripal Daphtary Sent: Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM To: VoiceOps at voiceops.org<mailto:VoiceOps at voiceops.org> Subject: [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck Hey group, I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that. I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices? The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target. Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this? Thanks ! Shri
If you have a "proper" billing system then yes you can. In our case we do lose money but its worth it. For instance my rate to Mongolia may go up and I may lose 2 cents a minute. If say at the same time Swiss mobile drops and we now make 1 cent more per minute with 100k minutes per month we have no issue losing $20.00 to gain $1000.00 per month. On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 7:00 AM Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Do you have a way to NOT route calls that are losing money? That would solve the ?underwater rate? problem?. Otherwise, you really can not do wholesale at all?
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at **https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/* <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>
*From:* Shripal Daphtary <shripald at gmail.com> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 1:24 PM *To:* Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> *Cc:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* Re: [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Thanks Paul and Dovid --
I guess the question is what if i get a completion for the most expensive carrier as opposed to the cheapest, and it turns out i'm underwater? The issue is the variance btw carrier1 (cheapest) and carrier6 (most expensive) could be 40 cents at times or more.
I'll take a look at GCS and R&R as well
We have an implementation of a2 billing to route international, but use it mostly to limit fraud exposure.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:36 AM Paul Stamoulis <pstamoulis at onestoptel.net> wrote:
Int?l rating and routing is not for the feint of heart or the hurried ? 215k of unique rating/routing options or ?breakouts? as known in the industry, is not too bad.
You can use MS excel if you have the time to continually update and are familiar with excel macros but remember that rate updates come at least 5once or twice a week with most vendors so times that by the number of vendors and be ready to update-update-update or else you can lose money.
You may be better off either purchasing specialized SW or using one of the many cloud based companies to manage your rates for you; GCS is one such company in the USA and R&R is another ? I have no relations with either company but I hear that they are both decent.
You should try to use all 6 carriers because, you are going to find that when one of the cheaper vendors does NOT work to one of the breakouts, then usually the other cheap vendors do NOT either. That?s when you need to be 6 or more routes deep or risk upsetting clients.
As far as the mark-up on rates, don?t sweat that too much round up and have a larger markup for the cheaper rates. For retial certainly , you should have more than enough room and for wholesale int?l sales, well that?s a whole other subject that gets much more complex? good luck,
*Paul Stamoulis +1 212 444 3003 Onestopcorp ? thousands of technology solutions... just one call!*
*Please connect at **https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/* <https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-stamoulis-56504531/>
*From:* VoiceOps <voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org> *On Behalf Of *Shripal Daphtary *Sent:* Tuesday, June 4, 2019 10:10 AM *To:* VoiceOps at voiceops.org *Subject:* [VoiceOps] Creating an International Rate Deck
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
This is (un) fortunately a problem I'm intimately familiar with. In the end Ive pretty much always solved it by writing a small utility or script. 1: You need to normalize breakouts across carriers, this means expanding to the longest match, so in the previous example: Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085 you end up with: 44: carrier A - 0.0025 442: carrier A - 0.0025, Carrier B - 0.0045 44207: carrier A - 0.0025, Carrier B - 0.0045, Carrier C - 0.0085 Great now your routing table is instead of 215k entries, 1.3M but its comparable. If you have a cost cap, before you do the next part, strip all routes that exceed it. You don't want pricing for routes you'll never use influencing your rates. 2: For each destination drop your lowest cost and use some combination of your tolerable route depth pricing * some margin. You might also consider a smarter algo like dropping lowest if more than std dev away from avg of next X carriers etc. Basically you dont want your price forced below carrier 2/3 by an abnormally low 1 who in the end will never complete calls satisfactorily for you. 3: Now, you need to de-duplicate, removing all routes whose price is identical to their parent route (route stripping the right-most digit, if that doesnt exist, strip again until you hit base country code) 4: Finally, take your rate deck to your sales team and listen to them tell you how they cannot sell it because its more expensive than <fly_ny_night_telecom>. There are lots of other ways to do this, but i pretty much always implement some flavor of this process. FYI, after expansion, if you have the means, its always worth adding a step that scans for fictitious codes. Occasionally IRSF perpetrators will inject bogus country sub-codes in the hopes of getting FAS traffic from fraudsters. Hope that helps. -Ryan On 6/4/2019 7:10 AM, Shripal Daphtary wrote:
Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for.? It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff.? ?We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR.? Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl.? Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this?? ?Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin?? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004.? Your rate? would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing.? We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever.? however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
It helps a hell of a lot! This is the process that I was looking for. Thanks, Shripal
On Jun 5, 2019, at 7:10 PM, Ryan Delgrosso <ryandelgrosso at gmail.com> wrote:
This is (un) fortunately a problem I'm intimately familiar with. In the end Ive pretty much always solved it by writing a small utility or script.
1: You need to normalize breakouts across carriers, this means expanding to the longest match, so in the previous example:
Number dialed: 44-20-7499-9000 Carrier A: 44 - 0.0025 Carrier B: 442 - 0.0045 Carrier C: 44207 - 0.0085
you end up with: 44: carrier A - 0.0025 442: carrier A - 0.0025, Carrier B - 0.0045 44207: carrier A - 0.0025, Carrier B - 0.0045, Carrier C - 0.0085
Great now your routing table is instead of 215k entries, 1.3M but its comparable.
If you have a cost cap, before you do the next part, strip all routes that exceed it. You don't want pricing for routes you'll never use influencing your rates.
2: For each destination drop your lowest cost and use some combination of your tolerable route depth pricing * some margin. You might also consider a smarter algo like dropping lowest if more than std dev away from avg of next X carriers etc. Basically you dont want your price forced below carrier 2/3 by an abnormally low 1 who in the end will never complete calls satisfactorily for you.
3: Now, you need to de-duplicate, removing all routes whose price is identical to their parent route (route stripping the right-most digit, if that doesnt exist, strip again until you hit base country code)
4: Finally, take your rate deck to your sales team and listen to them tell you how they cannot sell it because its more expensive than <fly_ny_night_telecom>.
There are lots of other ways to do this, but i pretty much always implement some flavor of this process.
FYI, after expansion, if you have the means, its always worth adding a step that scans for fictitious codes. Occasionally IRSF perpetrators will inject bogus country sub-codes in the hopes of getting FAS traffic from fraudsters.
Hope that helps.
-Ryan
On 6/4/2019 7:10 AM, Shripal Daphtary wrote: Hey group,
I have a question that I have been struggling with for years and have never come up with a good solution for. It revolves around International Rate Deck creation, but i guess it could be for any tariff. We have multiple carriers for International, however, i'm trying out Thinq right now so we can use their LCR. Our other carriers aren't very successful with Intl. Thinq's rate deck to me is 6 carriers for each prefix, making it around 215,000 lines. The carrier(s) that have the lowest cost for each prefix varies, so i can't turn off the most expensive three or something like that.
I was thinking of taking the least expensive 3 carriers and then averaging them and creating my rate from that average and then only allow Thinq to go 3 carriers deep. Does anyone have any experience with this? Are there any best practices?
The second part of the question is how does one calculate the profit margin? Let's say you wanted to make 35% for retail and 20% for wholesale, but if you call UK landline, the cost is only 0.004. Your rate would be 0.0054 for retail and 0.0048, which is nothing. We have been doing something like If your cost is less than 0.03, then increase by 35% or 20% or whatever. however, that doesn't always work if the cost is super close to your target.
Does anyone have any hard and fast rules that they use when creating decks? is there software that can help my puny brain think through this?
Thanks !
Shri
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participants (6)
-
abalashov＠evaristesys.com -
dovid＠telecurve.com -
jared＠compuwizz.net -
pstamoulis＠onestoptel.net -
ryandelgrosso＠gmail.com -
shripald＠gmail.com