We’ve mentioned before how anyone purporting to offer you “unlimited channels” or “unlimited free calls” are, in our experience, either telling fibs or reckless. Channel limits are a critical way we protect customers from each other and, due to the granular way we enable them, they’re a crucial element of our fraud controls – So channel limits are good!
Sometimes though, they can get in the way; customers have unexpected traffic bursts that they’d like us to handle, and it makes sense all round we do – if we can do so without affecting other customers.
So, with all that in mind, our systems will now ignore account channel limits – both inbound and outbound – where it is viable for us to do so. We determine when this is in code but in round-about terms it is when the network is 100% available and quiet. Because this is so dynamic you should not rely on it being possible and in QoS terms we’d consider it “below best efforts”.
As a reminder of how we treat channel limits for different accounts please see the following table or this blog post.:
| SERVICE LEVEL | PRIMARY CHANNEL LIMIT | BACKUP CHANNEL LIMIT | USAGE BEYOND LIMIT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | Best efforts | n/a | n/a |
| Startup | Best efforts | n/a | Below best efforts |
| Virtual Interconnect | Reserved | Best efforts | Below best efforts |
| Managed Interconnect | Reserved | Best efforts | Below best efforts |
Please note: None of the above affects the quality of routing used, simply the priority given to the call being allocated a channel. The above also assumes 100% network availability, in the event of a major outage that wipes out our pre-planned headroom, we will reduce Primary Channel limits by a factor; this is why higher tier accounts have a notion of Primary and Backup channels.
Now, given that our channel limits are also a fraud mitigation feature there’s a few exceptions to this relaxation:
- Account rate limits do not change, only channel limits
- Account channel limits for international calls default to the primary channel limit.
You can edit this as required - Trunk channel limits continue to work as you define them;
it is only the account-level channel limits that will be relaxed.
We hope this helps and naturally look forward to your feedback.
