On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:08 PM, Alek Barsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Allstream is offering PRI. But with all installation charges and PRI cost ( > 1200 install + $700 for PRI ) it gets expensive.
Alek, So, if you spread that out, it's $800/mo for the first year. The good news is that it's all you'll have to pay if you're calling locally. Besides, you can usually beat them up to reduce or waive the install charge. I've run expensive dialers like Mosaix and Genesys with hundreds of lines. You really should understand how they work and how they will work with your lines and affect your billing rates. For instance, if you sign up with a provider who has a really cheap per-minute rate but has a 60 second minimum, you could be in for a surprise. Let's say that your system listens to an answering machine for 5 seconds to analyze the sound and figure out that it's not a live contact, and then spends 1 second on tear down and setting setting up the next call. You'd be doing 1 call every 6 seconds on each channel. That means you'd be incurring 60 seconds of billing time for every 6 channel seconds. Put another way, your agent working an 8 hour day with 6 production hours will incur 66 phone billing hours. That's 6 hours for the people they're talking to and 60 for the answering machines that the system is filtering out for them. All that is to say that you should look carefully at the minimum calling time. I often see cheap rates with 1 minute or 5 minute minimums. By contrast, if you were using a PRI, you'd have no incremental cost for this. Run a side-by-side with your proposed local calling rates via VOIP and extrapolate them over a month with 8 agents talking for 6 hours/day and 8 other lines setting up 60+ calls per hour for 6 hours/day. It's surprising how fast the partial pennies add up. On that note, see if there's a minimum charge. I once had 3 cents with 6 second minimums and by that math, my 5 second calls should be $.003 and round down to $0.00 because the carrier did rounding on a per-call basis. Instead, they billed me a 1 cent minimum. This added up to a discrepancy of around $30k in just over a year. Dialers make mostly short calls. You mention that VOIP doesn't care how many calls go through at once. I don't have tonnes of experience pricing large volume VOIP services but most of the ones I looked at did specify a maximum number of concurrent channels and there were charges to get more. I would encourage you to talk to your dialer software provider and see how their call classification system works. Most of them are much more effective with ISDN cause codes provided by a PRI. If the voice on the other end says "Your call can not be completed as dialed" and you don't have PRI service, that call could be passed to an agent or redialed repeatedly. PRI service would send you something like a cause code 1 or 21 and your system would be able to mark that record complete with meaningful information. That's important when you are getting down to the last 20% of a list. If you're not knocking out numbers that are unreachable, you'll chew up lots of channel and system time while your agents sit idle. Also, when you consider various circuits, don't just look at the per minute charge, factor in the cost of a data link with sufficient quality. You're not going to be able to run 16 concurrent calls uncompressed over a $40 DSL internet line without compression (usually a quality tradeoff). Someone has proposed a dedicated DSL solution and I think that's much more suited to VOIP than firing it out over a regular Internet connection. On most of these lines, the upstream bandwidth is lower than the downstream. As a result, I talk to people on circuits like this and I'm hearing their voice come in choppy but they report no problems on their end. Of course it sounds good on their end! They have 7 megs of bandwidth flowing in their direction but only 600k or 800k coming in my direction. I think an uncompressed ULAW call is over 80kbps (maybe over 100) when you include SIP and other overhead. You can see how that gets congested when you're trying to get 16 lines (8 people at a 2:1 ratio). There are certainly arguments for VOIP over PRI. I have this debate at TAUG meetings from time to time. I'm in the PRI camp and others have solid reasons for being in the VOIP camp. I don't mean to say "VOIP isn't ready for serious use" or anything like that. I hope I've been helpful, and I hope you find a good solution for your project. All the best, Dave > Bell is asking $32 for business line on 3 year contract. > three is single good thing about VoIP ( in this situation ) nobody is asking > for the contract. But providers do mention possibilities of "Call Setup" > charges to recover hammering of their PBX. From what I can see going "VoIP > only" is simple - all I need is Asterisk box. > My client agreed to go ahead with pilot in his Toronto office. We will > engage 2 people to test VoIP dialer and will figure out few things: > 1. Quality of the VoIP conversations (big concern with the client - he is > aware of people utilizing Virtual Dialers in USA with very poor voice > quality) > 2. Amount of dropped calls by the dialer > 3. Maximum possible dialing ratio ( VoIP does not really have limitation on > number of calls setup ). > 4. Possibility of Calling across North America at 0.6 cents a minute, > compare to 2 - is very lucrative. > > Alek. > > Dave Donovan wrote: >> >> On Sun, Jul 13, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Alek Barsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>> >>> I have a client who wants to setup telemarketing Call Center in Barrie, >>> Ontario. It will be, at least initially, small place with 8 people >>> working >>> on predictive dialer. My client is not very technical and he is under >>> >> >> Alex, >> >> I wouldn't do anything but PRI in that situation. If you're using >> good predictive dialing software, then it will be much more effective >> if it has good ISDN call progress information. If you give it analog >> lines, it has to do waveform analysis and guess at the outcome of the >> call every time. (accuracy is questionable) If you use VOIP, you >> should get good call progress in theory but I think that call progress >> implementations are inconsistent from one provider to the next. >> >> Look into pricing the full PRI rather than a partial one. If there's >> promotional pricing, it's probably on the full circuits. At the place >> I work now, they signed a contract for 5 years (ARG!!!) for 9 B >> channels for about $1100/mo. The list price on a fully populated PRI >> from bell is around $1350. The moral of the story is, don't count on >> the sales rep to tell you that you're not getting the best bang for >> your buck. >> >> I'm not sure what the market is like in Barrie but full T1 PRIs in the >> 416 area can be had for $700 and under. It's hard to beat for >> reliability and the cost should make sense over VOIP especially if >> you're calling local. >> >> That's my opinion for what it's worth. >> >> Dave >> >> >>> >>> impression that if VoIP long distance is much cheaper compare to >>> traditional >>> PSTN, then local calling has to be going for close to nothing. His >>> intention >>> is for those people to call only locally in Barrie. >>> Can anybody recommend VoIP provider who doesn't mind providing SIP/IAX >>> termination for telemarketing company. SO far I am not getting too many >>> good >>> offers. To my total surprise, Bell doesn't offer SIP termination. I tried >>> an >>> Allsream and they are having difficulties understanding what I want (same >>> as >>> Bell). Unlimitel told me to take a hike - they say too many call setup >>> and >>> not too much chargeable time. >>> >>> Alek. >>> BarsikNet Systems. >>> >>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>> >>> >>> >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> >> >> > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
