Many moons back I had posted my understanding of the business behind virtual numbers and then subsequently I posted some corrected information. Both of them was in reference to an organization (a business enterprise?) called VoIPuser. Yesterday I received an email from Dean, a principal in that company sent me an email that explains further the charging mechanism. Since my post could be used to suggest that it is VoIPuser is the one charging the higher fee, I thought I will post his entire email for your reference. This is my summary: some callers may be charged a higher fee; but it is collected by the local service provider; VoIPuser gets the same amount from all service providers, which is regulated; they use the revenue to fund the operational costs. My take is that even if VoIPuser is not a villain here, you have to careful in subscribing this service if your friends and relatives (for whose benefit you are doing this in the first place) are using the “greedy” access providers who charge higher fees.
I'm afraid I'm a bit behind with my keeping up with blogs and only just noticed this one about UK DID's :
I thought I would drop you a line to clarify the position about UK DID's as there could be the impression from that entry that VoIP User are charging "exhorbitant" rates which is not actually the case.
0844 and 0870 numbers are allocated by BT as part of the local-loop "unbundling" process (historical unravelling of a monopoly).
BT are regulated by Ofcom in the pricing structures of these numbers to third parties in that they are not able to charge ISP's more than 5p/min for these number ranges, and 10p/min for the 0871 range.
VoIP User gets a fractional share of the 5p/min revenue which goes into our community outbound "pot" (currently in the domain of our beta-testers and we hope to launch to public this week).
Other ISP's (for example One-Tel or Kingston Communications) are not regulated in these ranges by Ofcom. Yet. This is likely to change next year.
What this means at the moment is, for example, One-Tel could charge their customers (the calling party), say 20p/min.
This would not increase the revenue share for either BT or consequently VoIP User, or any other third party reseller. We, as with others, still get a revenue share of 5p/min. One-Tel, in this example, would make an additional 15p/min profit.
So, in this example, the provider making the "exhorbitant" margins (and I agree with you in this respect) would be One-Tel (the callers provider), and would be a matter for the consumer to take up with One-Tel and complain, or move to a more reasonable PSTN provider.
All our revenue, after server hosting costs, goes into our community pool which is to be released to the public for free use.
We certainly are not out to incur anybody exhorbitant call charges. In this respect your blog entry raises a good point and I have now amended our control panel (which I will upload this evening) where users choose numbers to make it absolutely clear that the 5p/min and 10p/min numbers are based on BT call rates and that callers may be charged more than the quoted rate if their service provider is not BT and is somewhat less than reasonable.
If those service providers were fully regulated, or consumers chose a better provider, the non-geographic 5p/min numbers actually represent reasonable value, especially when you consider that at 5p/min on BT rates we will route a call to almost any landline on the planet.
When we launch our free community outbound service, we will be issuing a new number range, for SIP/IAX2 only, at a fixed 3p/min (BT rates) at any time of day. That will make us the lowest cost DID provider in the UK and at 3p/min our numbers would actually be cheaper than BT PSTN costs during the daytime.
The issue with non-geographic numbers is not with the supplier of those numbers, but with the telephone ISP's who are charging them out with an exhorbitant profit margin on top.
Conversely, I should point out that some providers actually charge less than the quoted 5p and 10p/min rates.
O2, a UK mobile phone provider, in fact include 0870 number ranges a part of their customers call plan, meaning that anyone from an O2 mobile phone could call one of our 0870 numbers within their "free minutes" package and not get charged anything further. Many of our members who are with O2 are using that facility to make international calls within their free minutes dial-plan.
Best regards,
Dean
PS I would have posted a comment on your blog entry but I think the opportunity to do so has timed out - my bad for not being up to date!
