We have a customer whos has a SIP trunk with 4 channels. They asked me if I could limit the incoming calls to 3 channels and reserve 1 channel for outgoing calls.
How would you approach this ?
Change SIP Providers? Unless they are tied into a mutual-death pact, there’s no reason to put up with that kind of silliness.
None of the providers I use have “channel” limits - I pay for everything by the usage-minute and can have as many calls as I want.
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OMG per minute? How can you possibly survive? I’m sure his provider gives them unlimited.
@chrischevy please note the sarcasm there. There is no possible way for “unlimited” to ever make sense for a SMB. With only 4 channels, you are certainly in the S of SMB.
Switch to any real SIP carrier. If you are in the U.S. I like Skyetel.
We also have a “per minute” provider, but the cost is not worth it because this customer is always on the phone. We’ve tried if and for this kind of business, the monthly cost is very high on a per minute trunk, much higher than on our Unlimited minutes but limited channels provider.
But you made me realize that I can probably use a second provider “per minute”, and in my outbound route, when the 4 unlimited trunks are used, I’ll failover to the per-minute trunk. This shouldn’t use too many minutes.
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There is no such thing as Unlimited look in the acceptable use policy, and now you have to pay for more channels with them as well,
@chrischevy Sure, you can have a snowflake company and be the oddball.
It is simple math to do.
October 2020 has 21 business days.
You have 4 channels.
You have 8 work hours in a business days.
You have 60 minutes in an hour.
21 * 60 * 8 * 4 = 40320 minutes in October.
Depending on the SIP carrier you costs will be between $150 and $385
But that is assuming that “all the time” is really “all the time”, literally.
That also means you have a huge lost missed opportunity because your 4 calls paths are busy. It is impossible to get another call at any time in the month.
How much do your unlimited trunks cost you? $20/month per channel? That means the cost is $80/month.
You have FreePBX, so do you can get the number to do the real math. How much are they actually on the phone? It does not take much reality to bring per minute in line with or better than unlimited.
Not arguing that your customer is not on the phone enough to make per minute more expensive. Just noting that it is not common.
by the end of the day your carrier is paying their upstream carrier a very low per minute rate there is no unlimited in wholesale, and reselling you a fake unlimited plan for a Mark up you can look in the terms of service, it’s very easy to find big sip trunk providers with a half ascent rate, and you can use different providers for inbound and outbound to get the best price since you can always set the caller ID for outbound, I have Offices with 20 people constantly on the phone 9 to 5 and their phone bill is under $50 including the FreePBX hosting cost and as many simultaneous calls as they want
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