what is the best asterisk based IP PBX in terms of ease and documentation
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@IT-ADMIN said:
lol, you can say that are not free but unlimited
Correct, although unlimited fries would be a very bad thing.
Unlimited minutes are a much better way to put it. Although even that is misleading. It is up to 43,800 minutes with every minute of non-use lost, per month. There are truly unlimited trunks that let you have as many concurrent calls as you want (but they all make you pay per minute.)
It IS unlimited within the constraints of use. But calling it that is a sales tactic to make it sound way better than it is.
It's like datacenter services. It is nearly always better to pay per GB of use, but always sounds better to have uncapped bandwidth. But with only the rarest exception, the former gives you better service at a lower price.
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yes calls practically are not unlimited but they use the term unlimited because they are sure that you will never start a call from the beginning of the month and finish it in the end of the month
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@JaredBusch said:
No, they are not. The calls as simply not billed by minute. The line still costs money, so that means calls are not free. But I understand what you meant anyway.
Note: all numbers based on US rates. You have to do this for your area.
In the US, I have to make this argument often. A business POTS line here can easily cost $25-$50 per month, generally I see them come in at $35 on average. This is prior to taxes, fees, and long distance.
So if you plan on making 10,000 minutes of local calls in a month, that means the $35 line costs you $0.0035 per minute. Quite cheap (cheaper than SIP), but not free.
Now since there are only 43,200 minutes in a month (assuming 30 days of 24 hours) that means dang near a full 25% of of the month must be on a call to get to 10,000 minutes.
Assuming a business month of 4 weeks of 40 hours tosses the number even more. That is only 9,600 minutes. This means that it is impossible to spend 10,000 minutes on that phone in a month. The rate is up to $0.0036 per minute.
Now you need to figure out how much time is truly spent on that phone. What if it is 50% of the day? At 4,600 minutes per month you are up to a rate of $0.0073 per minute. That is nearly the cost to use SIP in the US.
Now add in a second line. How many minutes does that one get? Well if it is a roll over or hunt group, it will never be as much as the main line. You could easily figure its usage at maybe 50% of the main line for many companies. At 2,300 minutes used in a month, that $35 line means you are paying $0.0152 per minute for those calls.
Aggregate the two together is $70/month and 6,900 minutes. That comes out to an average telecom per minute rate of $0.0101 per minute. This IS the basic SIP termination rate in the US.
Nice write up!
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@IT-ADMIN said:
yes calls practically are not unlimited but they use the term unlimited because they are sure that you will never start a call from the beginning of the month and finish it in the end of the month
Jared's example is pretty true today in terms of normal usage - but 15+ years ago that wouldn't have been the case. People could and would be dialed into their ISPs for potentially every min that the system was up. If they had an unlimited ISP connection as well, all the more reason to never disconnect.
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@Dashrender said:
@IT-ADMIN said:
yes calls practically are not unlimited but they use the term unlimited because they are sure that you will never start a call from the beginning of the month and finish it in the end of the month
Jared's example is pretty true today in terms of normal usage - but 15+ years ago that wouldn't have been the case. People could and would be dialed into their ISPs for potentially every min that the system was up. If they had an unlimited ISP connection as well, all the more reason to never disconnect.
Oh, from dial up Internet? I forgot about that use case since this one can only be voice. Yes, there was a time when that "unlimited" mattered very different from today or, more importantly, from a case where you are considering voice calls.
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@IT-ADMIN said:
yes calls practically are not unlimited but they use the term unlimited because they are sure that you will never start a call from the beginning of the month and finish it in the end of the month
Well they use the term because it's good marketing. It throws people's brains off in how they consider things.
The very fact that you are considering getting two lines instead of one, though, shows the limits of unlimited already.
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2 POTS line to be able to receive 2 simultaneous calls not to increase the call duration
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IT-ADMIN said:
yes calls practically are not unlimited but they use the term unlimited because they are sure that you will never start a call from the beginning of the month and finish it in the end of the month
Well they use the term because it's good marketing. It throws people's brains off in how they consider things.
The very fact that you are considering getting two lines instead of one, though, shows the limits of unlimited already.
I'm not sure I agree with you there.
I believe that most people see unlimited and realize it's not really unlimited - it's unlimited within the bandwidth for the single line, which as demonstrated by Jared is 43,200, and limited to a single call at a time.
SIP is what breaks it for the everyman - the idea that you could have more calls all coming in at once is unexpected when they are accustomed to POTS lines. Of course if they are dealing with PRI, they do anticipate the ability to make/receive up to 23 calls simultaneously.
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@IT-ADMIN said:
2 POTS line to be able to receive 2 simultaneous calls not to increase the call duration
The number of calls that can be taken at a time naturally increases the limit of minutes available in a month. An unlimited SIP trunk doesn't have that limit. So in comparison to other real world options, it is a very real limit.
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@Dashrender said:
I believe that most people see unlimited and realize it's not really unlimited - it's unlimited within the bandwidth for the single line, which as demonstrated by Jared is 43,200, and limited to a single call at a time.
They realize it when you say it. But subconsciously it makes people do weird things. Read "Predictably Irrational." Little things like getting people to repeat the word "unlimited", no matter how much they know that it is not true, will make them think about it in an irrational way and associate value to it that does not exist. Another trick is bundling. Add services together in a bundle and even if the end result is worse than each service individually people will pay for for the "bundle" because of a perceived value that doesn't actually exist.
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@Dashrender said:
SIP is what breaks it for the everyman - the idea that you could have more calls all coming in at once is unexpected when they are accustomed to POTS lines. Of course if they are dealing with PRI, they do anticipate the ability to make/receive up to 23 calls simultaneously.
SIP just exposes the limits that were always there
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I believe that most people see unlimited and realize it's not really unlimited - it's unlimited within the bandwidth for the single line, which as demonstrated by Jared is 43,200, and limited to a single call at a time.
They realize it when you say it. But subconsciously it makes people do weird things. Read "Predictably Irrational." Little things like getting people to repeat the word "unlimited", no matter how much they know that it is not true, will make them think about it in an irrational way and associate value to it that does not exist. Another trick is bundling. Add services together in a bundle and even if the end result is worse than each service individually people will pay for for the "bundle" because of a perceived value that doesn't actually exist.
Right, just like why we still mark things $12.99 instead of $13. 12 is always better than 13...
As for bundles, sometimes they are better - I recently called to cancel my home phone service. But instead of lowering my bill it would have raised it. Fortunately they have some changes that could be made to reduce my bill (get rid of caller ID) and at the same time jump to the top tier on internet access. 100 Mbit down is pretty nice for downloading MS ISOs.
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@Dashrender said:
As for bundles, sometimes they are better
Nothing inherently wrong with bundles, but companies use them to get people to overbuy more than they would have bought or even moreso.... to get them to be unable to identify a bad value. I've seen people actually argue that paying a 20% premium for a bundle was better than buying the services individually for less money because they thought that "bundling" itself was good.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Nothing inherently wrong with bundles, but companies use them to get people to overbuy more than they would have bought or even moreso...
Bundling is almost never a good deal for the users. It is generally just oversold services that the marketing has convinced you to be cheaper.
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A vendor wouldn't offer a bundle if it didn't cause people to overspend. There is normally a rare customer who would have bought that exact bundle AND a vendor that discounts it. But not all bundles are discounted. The whole point of bundling is to be a sales tactic.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
As for bundles, sometimes they are better
Nothing inherently wrong with bundles, but companies use them to get people to overbuy more than they would have bought or even moreso.... to get them to be unable to identify a bad value. I've seen people actually argue that paying a 20% premium for a bundle was better than buying the services individually for less money because they thought that "bundling" itself was good.
Yeah, you can't win against logic like that... ROFLOL
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Nothing inherently wrong with bundles, but companies use them to get people to overbuy more than they would have bought or even moreso...
Bundling is almost never a good deal for the users. It is generally just oversold services that the marketing has convinced you to be cheaper.
Probably true, but if I would have dumped phone service wholesale (which now costs me $12/month) my bill would have gone up by over $30. Of course I could have dumped HBO and the would have been cut in half.
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@Dashrender said:
Yeah, you can't win against logic like that... ROFLOL
And that was from someone with a Master's degree from a top university that consults to Google! It's amazing what simple tricks like "bundling" will play on you.
There was a study done of Harvard MBAs in how to direct them to buying a chosen product. They were taught how the trick would work, then the trick was done to them and most of the MBA students would fall for it anyway (the "middle choice" trick.)
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I will admit that these tactics work on me more than I'm happy about. Though I do really try to think about the options and consider them.
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@Dashrender said:
I will admit that these tactics work on me more than I'm happy about. Though I do really try to think about the options and consider them.
I don't know if there is any mental trick for identifying them. I grew up with a father who was very aware of advertising and marketing and would point it out all the time. Instead of a bundle sounding good to me, I instantly jump to "they are trying to trick me." Having something bundled doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy, it makes me feel like I'm being taken advantage of.
When I hear "nine out of ten dentists recommend toothpaste X", what my brain hears is "Nine out of ten doctors said to just use whatever and one out of ten actually said that using this was bad!"
