Rich Tehrani informs us of three new services Packet8 has added to its hosted PBX (otherwise known as Centrex) service.
The first service, Virtual Extension is an extension number that accepts only incoming calls and calls to these extensions can be forwarded to any other number by incurring per minute charges. Each extension is $9.95 per month. (Remember, that the service provider receives access charges for terminating calls, meaning each Virtual extension is a pure revenue source.)
The second feature, Metered extensions incur a lower monthly charge ($19.95 instead of $39.95) but receive a limited (250) minutes, with $0.039 per minute beyond that.
The third feature is porting of toll free numbers from an existing provider.
Rich’s concluding remark is noteworthy: “My take is, FINALLY! Let’s stop focusing on price. It’s all about the services… [t]he ones you can’t get over the PSTN. Sell the services first and tout the price last. That is the sure way to make it as a VoIP service provider.” Is he suggesting that one can not get these features in PSTN? Centrex or PBXs can’t really offer these features? Is VoIP label going to lull us from even a basic level of critical analysis? I say that the search for purple minutes hasn’t yielded much result.
Posted by aswath at March 16, 2005 06:13 PM