We’re finding some of our less agile competitors trying to compete with us in words and claims. Whilst most of our existing customers are astute enough to see straight through these, we wanted to deal with a few of them head-on.
They offer “unlimited channels for free”
Do they? Is that written into their contract? Perhaps you should try sending a few million calls in a short time span and see what happens. We reckon it’ll be one of two things:
- You’ll get a panicked call begging you to stop as you’re affecting service for their other customers. Do you really want to deal with a carrier that cannot prevent another customer taking you out of service?
- There actually is a channel limit but they haven’t had the honesty to tell you what it is or give you any control over it.
Reality is that channels have a cost and our business is about optimising the return on that. The fact we have controls to protect customers from each other, and the honesty to tell you what the limit is can only be an advantage in our mind.
They offer “unlimited calls for a fixed fee”
We recommend you check the small print. We believe you will find that free actually equals zero-rated, and zero-rated is on a finite quantity per trunk. In other words, if you exceed a given number of minutes on a trunk then you pay for the whole lot at a very penal rate. If you don’t use that many then you’re giving them breakage and likely paying more overall.
This model appeals to resellers as they can just mark the channel price up and sell it, but for more astute wholesale customers it makes no sense and will probably cost more overall by the laws of economics. In fact, if you wish to compete with this offer head-on, and offer your customers fixed price trunks whilst pocketing the breakage, be sure to ask about our Managed Interconnect service level.
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When comparing, do be sure to ask specifically about:
- Fraud Protection. Ask twice as the first answer will likely be “we do that too”, and then be sure to challenge some of the claims made. We’re confident nobody in the industry offers the level of fraud protection Simwood does whilst many others claim to. Telling you how much you’ve already spent doesn’t count.
- API. Do they have a secure API for you to automate your business and fraud controls? Neither emailed spreadsheets nor unencrypted telnet count – it is 2016 not 1990.
- Uptime. You can see ours at status.simwood.com and we know our reliability compares awesomely to our competitors. By all means subscribe and monitor us and compare it to others.
We’d love your feedback on this kind of thing, especially if you’ve heard another meme we need to shine some reality on! SIP Carefully! ®
