Stephen,
Re:
>>Telecom Consumers Pay More for Local Than Long Distance, Insight Research Reports <<
This is one of the impediments to domestic ITSP services whose gateway numbers and locations are sparsely situated. That is, those startup VoIP companies with less than ubiquitous reach that do not fit the regular public on-net [PSTN] model.
Many of these are offering interstate rates south of 7 cpm, yet the tail sections between the customer and their closest gateway location (say, an Albany NY caller, who must access a gateway in NY City) may be as much as 50 cpm to 75 cpm due to local company (intrastate) calling charges. And don't try this from a coin booth.
If the remote party is similarly situated in La Jolla, say, and their gateway is in SFO, you wind up with a coast to coast call that could conceivably be almost $1.50 to $2.00 per minute. Insanity.
Many of these situations are being mitigated by toll-free 800 access on the calling party side, with the costs of those initial set-up calls being amortized by the ITSP in the cost per minute charges, or in some cases assessing minimums or monthly fees. But that only reduces the costs on one half of the equation, namely the calling side.
Creativity at the remote geteway location is required by the ITSP at some point, using low cost T-1s between distant cities, and making arrangements for tandem office connections to a growing number of "qualified" locations. This requires a certain level of understanding and skills, and a decent amount of capital to afford.
But as soon as you begin to resort to this form of networking, you begin to re-enter the domain of normal cost factors associated with non-ITSP topologies. And therein lies its own set of ironies.
The remote costs are still dependent on the proximity of the called party to the closest gateway. Overall improvement rises as the number of gateway locations increases, and the distances between them narrow.
As you can see, being a provider of proprietary and isolated network services, without peering privileges with other ITSPs, can become quite an expensive proposition, unless your targeted subscribers happen to all be inner-city dwellers and businesses in the nation's top dozen or so local calling areas.
The other alternative is to hop aboard a ready-built overlay of POPs such as PSI has done on their own network, or some other such re-use of existing facilities that represents a near-ubiquitous reach. But those have their own set of problems too, similar to those encountered on any cloud... even if they do make special provisions with QoS eventually, and partitioned bandwidth. FWIW. |
