The per extension model doesn't work anymore, as far as business
customers. Say they have 10 phones/extensions at $35/mo each. Comcast or
AT&T can come in and blow that away with $200/mo business service. Been
there, done that, cannot do that anymore.
Don't think you can just jump into doing voice. IMO, it's not worth it
at all. Too many headaches. For your own business, sure, have at it.
On 4/6/2015 9:33 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
You’ve got to charge for something. It has become standard practice
not to charge for minutes, even though you get charged for minutes.
So some combination of $X per DID and $Y per extension. Especially
when you are talking to businesses, they are used to paying per
“line”, where if they want to be able to have Z simultaneous incoming
or outgoing calls, they need Z lines, usually each with its own DID
but configured as a rollover or hunt group to the main number. But
with VoIP you can have as many calls as you want with just one “line”,
so you need a different model. Also, features like voicemail and call
waiting and caller ID that used to bring in tons of money for the
phone companies are now expected free as part of standard service. So
you need to charge for something. Otherwise you end up supporting 20
or 100 handsets with unlimited local and long distance for a total of
$20 per month and you go broke. I think the idea is that an extension
is a placeholder for a bucket of minutes, if a business or MDU has 100
extensions, they will likely make 100 times as many calls as someone
with one extension. On the other hand, a business with 1 DID and 100
extensions probably shouldn’t pay as much as 100 individual customers
each with an extensions and a DID, especially since you will probably
pay some small amount per month per DID for origination.
