SIP Trunks & Pricing

[greatchoice]

I am used to paying a company for unlimited US calls. No need to worry if someone leaves the phone off the hook and such. But I see Amazon is now offering the Chime which has reasonable rates and i am sure on their servers would be optimal quality as the company i use now.

What I am not understanding is, if my trunk number is with the unlimited plan, but I want to start moving towards the pay per I would have to port the number over to Amazon so calls terminate there.

Secondly, is there a way to ensure that someone doesn't leave the phone off hook and ring up a huge pay per minute cost?

When it comes to billing, how are you billing? Are you offering unlimited service? Is there a per minute cap? Do you charge per minute?

 

[cobaltit]

So you might want to start by clarifying what position you are asking from. Are you asking as a customer or as a reseller?

From a customer perspective, Amazon is probably going to be good, but who knows. They definitely have cheap pricing but I'm guessing the service is going to be meh since it's probably outsourced to India just like the regular customer service.

From a reseller perspective, they aren't really setup for that so unless you are selling 3CX as a hosted extension model where you might run into issues with taxes and such.

What I am not understanding is, if my trunk number is with the unlimited plan, but I want to start moving towards the pay per I would have to port the number over to Amazon so calls terminate there.

This almost seems like a question but there's no question mark. If you want to use a provider for incoming calls, they have to own the number. It's common sense.

Secondly, is there a way to ensure that someone doesn't leave the phone off hook and ring up a huge pay per minute cost?

I mean the PPM rate is pretty low so how long would a phone have to be left off-hook to qualify as huge? Even unlimited providers have a soft cap where maybe they won't cut you off but they will reach out if you are really pushing a lot of minutes on an unlimited plan so if they haven't reached out, you are probably worrying too much. And 3CX has a default call length limit of 3 hours I believe.

When it comes to billing, how are you billing? Are you offering unlimited service? Is there a per minute cap? Do you charge per minute?

This is purely a business decision and it's unclear if you are assuming other people are reselling Amazon Chime or if you are asking in general. I can tell you as someone who has doing this for a very long time that their pricing is very good, but I'd be very leery about support. I think I saw someone else talk about another provider that was email only support for voice which boggles the mind. I understand it's cheaper and easy why to hide outsourced support, but voice is too important for that in my opinion.
Also, ne thing that should be of concern is that Amazon Chime does not offer e911. So you would need another provider for this.