Long live Least Cost Routing

jes

jes

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Long live Least Cost Routing

A quick death has been predicted for Least Cost Routing after the latest interconnect rate cuts, but an industry player says people may be misguided
 
Kinda off topic but since the article does speak to it :)

I may be no Lions supporter but, under John Mitchell, I'm not sure I'd be writing them off so early on...
 
I didn't even finish the article, but go the lions!!!
 
No alternative

There has been much discussion regarding the death of premi-cells recently. However there are no real alternatives for the low end of the SME market.

VOIP products and services usually have a break even point, requiring X amount of spend before becoming a viable option.

To date, I have not seen a premi-cell alternative for customers spending less than R7500 on mobile calls. VOX, Vodacom Business, etc have great IP platforms however do not have a solution for this portion of the market.

Discounted premi-cells, provide cheaper calls to networks at a low-entry. Until such time as dedicated bandwidth is viable, the premi-cell market will continue to fight for its last dying breath.

I know that we as a voice provider have already migrated customers over to IP solution where possible. The rest ... discounted subs and call rates on premi-cells. We dont make as much money, however we offer a service to the customers whereby there is a saving and a month-to-month contract where we can migrate them if we see another option.
 
We're about to move away from our Premicells/LCR to these guys - http://www.switchtel.co.za/ - have had 3 lines with them for a year now (SIP over ADSL with a cheap Telkom local-only bandwidth account), and they've been more stable than telkom voice or the Premicell lines. We administer nothing, it's a 100% outsourced solution, they give you the login details, you punch them into your SIP device and bam, you're online. If you want another incoming line, you pay R50/mo and it's up in 5 minutes. We're a pretty small company, 2 Premicells with Talk1000's (which we hardly ever go over) serve our needs, and are saving money with the VOIP solution.

I feel sorry for the oldskool LCR guys, they're in the "adapt or die" phase of a market transition, and quite a few of them seem to be battling to adapt.
 
elvis_presley said:
We're about to move away from our Premicells/LCR to these guys - http://www.switchtel.co.za/ - have had 3 lines with them for a year now (SIP over ADSL with a cheap Telkom local-only bandwidth account), and they've been more stable than telkom voice or the Premicell lines.
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How can it be more stable than Telkom voice lines? Your ADSL runs over the same copper used for the voice line and if something goes wrong it's usually on the ADSL part of the service and not the voice service. My voice service has not been down in years but my adsl has gone for a ball of snot a good few times in that same period and I'm not even including ISP network related issues here.
 
is it official that there will be an interconnection rate cut in march this year?
 
Kgabogk said:
is it official that there will be an interconnection rate cut in march this year?
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yes! but do you think the providers will drop their rates?! no, they will just offer more value.
 
ponder said:
How can it be more stable than Telkom voice lines? Your ADSL runs over the same copper used for the voice line and if something goes wrong it's usually on the ADSL part of the service and not the voice service. My voice service has not been down in years but my adsl has gone for a ball of snot a good few times in that same period and I'm not even including ISP network related issues here.
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That was my first reaction when we were sold the solution, but it's how it is. Less dropped calls, no line hiss, and less downtime. You might have experienced different with your line, but the VOIP chaps told us it's more reliable, and it does seem to be the case generally. Perhaps it has to do with the fact we don't use it for voice at all, just data? Added to that, we have a 2nd Mweb Uncapped (previously IS Uncapped) business ADSL account we use for normal office internet, that we can route the traffic over in case of the rare VOIP ADSL line failure. We've never had both lines down at once. There's a little more latency on Mweb than on the Telkom local bandwidth, but it's still miles better than a Premicell.

We've found ISP issues on national traffic is pretty much nonexistant. In fact with the telkom accounts it hasn't been an issue even for one second.
 
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