Hi, In the past, this list has debated the finer points of setting up a group/cooperative to "pool" minutes to reach a particular carrier's minimum, allowing the group to get the benefits of working directly with the carrier, and share in the reduced costs. If I recall correctly, this never went far since it ends up coming down to finding one company willing to take on the financial responsibility (e.g. sign the contract) with a large revenue commit.
So we are using about $10K per month and are considering trying to reach Level3's $25K take-or-pay so we can work directly with them rather than work through a reseller. It's not that I don't like resellers, but I'm always disappointed; in my experience they don't typically give access to Level3 APIs, ordering is one step slower, and obviously they have their markup. In one word, they are not "transparent". $25K is about 3.5M US termination minutes per month, so I was thinking I can take on the $25K commit, if I could find about 30 people who had 100,000 termination minutes per month. Since I'm not really trying to profit from this particular venture [I'm only trying to bump up our volumes so we can work directly with Level3], I was thinking I would sell the minutes at cost (I don't have exact numbers; Level3 is supposed to be sending me pricing; I'm expecting 0.007/min blended or less), and we'd have a win-win situation. We'd try do this switchless, so you'd be passing traffic directly with Level3. I'd prefer to do termination, since it's easy, but we could do origination & toll-free origination if the ordering was very low volume. If this interests you, please contact me off list and if there's enough response I'll formulate a detailed plan. Brian Scott TierraNet Inc. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz