There's been an awful lot of change in the US market since we first became a CLEC in 2017 (wow, nearly 10 years ago!) but mostly in the last couple of years. The regulatory regime has tightened, not just for us but crucially for our customers. That has cleaned the market up massively, but operators have had to up their game, and "pretending" to be a US operator is no longer an option.
That has in turn done a few things for our customer base. It has vindicated our long-held position on scrotes, although the burden on our sales team as a filter has ballooned with so many scrotes looking for a home for their traffic. Moreover, our non-US customers have had to themselves become compliant with new requirements, agencies, and filings. Some have taken this in their stride, others have made a massive ordeal out of it and resent us for changes the FCC has imposed, but we generally support them.
There are still operators pretending to offer service in the US and bemoaning us for being compliant. One "peer" advising our customers on US compliance when they have zero presence and zero licence there took the biscuit. If you resent compliance to protect consumers, please feel free to use them and see how long service lasts.
This is a long way of saying that our pricing is woefully out of date, and effective September 1st (for billing October 1st), our rentals on US numbers will increase as below. Naturally, Managed Interconnect customers with a bespoke committed rate will continue to benefit from that rate, at least until contract renegotiation.
Further, while e911 was never relevant to use as a wholesale operator, our customer profile has changed, and it now is. Effective immediately, you can upload address data through our portal and API. It is in API v3 rather than the newer architecture for easy compatibility with UK 999 integrations and will be deprecated/migrated alongside in due course.
Commercials for e911/911 vary in the US to what our UK customers will be used to. We are not applying any kind of database update fee - they're free of charge - and calls to 911 are also free of charge. However, numbers (a.k.a. DIDs/DDIs) which are e911 enabled (i.e. have had data uploaded against them) are charged a monthly uplift to the rental to cover the elements which are not charged. This is not our model; we've followed local convention.
Our monthly per-number pricing for the US is now:
| Tier | Number rental | E911 uplift |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | £2.00 | £0.75 |
| Startup | £1.00 | £0.75 |
| Virtual Interconnect | £0.75 | £0.75 |
| Managed Interconnect | POA | £0.75 |
All prices are per telephone number, per month, ex VAT at the time of this blog being published. Current rates are always on our rates page.
Our existing statutory investigation fee is unaffected by this change and will apply wherever a call is routed to 911 and no e911 data exists. In this circumstance, the call cannot be routed to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), the functional equivalent of UK EHA, because there is no address. This not only risks lives but incurs additional cost and process all round. We will take an extremely dim view of any customers who seek to minimise rental costs by chancing the investigation fee and risking lives in the process.
We will route calls to 911 where the call originates from a US number. Calls for numbers allocated through Simwood should be sent to Simwood, and the same with other providers - same preference as in the UK. However, as in the UK, we will connect any call and deal with the compliance afterwards.
911 should not be tested, but to make this possible, you can configure 933 to route identically and make test calls to 933. The call will answer and read back the address information configured against the number. Furthermore, API updates do not require the overnight batch processing Calypso requires despite the user base being roughly 5x the size. Updates via our API should be reflected relatively instantly. This is useful for testing, but you should not build production logic requiring it!
Hopefully, this is a welcome update that'll help all our customers with US estates improve their offer and compliance.