I still get customers paying $60/seat. *shrugs* I haven't added any new ones lately, but I haven't been pushing that lately either.
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "George Skorup (Cyber Broadcasting)" <geo...@cbcast.com> To: af@afmug.com Sent: Monday, April 6, 2015 10:31:59 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] VoIP 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.
