How Unlimited is Your Unlimited?

For the past few days, we've been debating the whole concept of transport pricing.

One of the things that we think really sets the Junction Networks Hosted PBX (yes - we'll be simplifying that product name soon enough) apart from the competition is our concept of unlimited users. We don't charge any user fees, regardless of if you set up one user or a thousand users within an account. Instead, we charge for value-added services (voicemail, queues, dial by name directories). When it comes to users on the system, when we say unlimited, we mean unlimited.

Yet, at the same time, we charge for PSTN transport. This means that if you set up a phone number to terminate at one of your users (or dial by name directories or queues or anything else on the platform) or if you make a call out to a standard phone number, you have to pay a usage charge. Why? Because we have to pay our network transport providers.

Up until now, our strategy has been simple. Take our per-minute rate, add a small surcharge to cover our overhead costs and then let our clients purchase it in a pay-as-you-drink mode. If you use 5 minutes, you pay for five minutes.

But some of our competitors are challenging this with "unlimited" transport. Being an old telco man myself, I'll fill you in on the rules to this sort of pricing scheme. And yes, the word scheme is probably the most accurate word one can use. Unlimited transport works by figuring what the average user spends on transport services, multiplying that by a factor and then passing that along. So, if the average user spends $14/month, the telco charges $22/month for unlimited usage and ends up making out like a bandit.

If you look closer at this model - you'll also see that unlimited transport isn't ever (unless the telco is truly visionary or lacks any sense of capacity management) truly unlimited. Most of the time, you're limited either by the number of users or the number of lines, or both. So, your unlimited plan is per user with a set number of simultaneous call channels. On top of that, when you read the fine print, there's usually some top-level cap to the number of minutes you can use. Or, they'll just shut you off you're a heavy user, or in Sprint lingo - a service abuser.

Since we believe in unlimited, unrestricted users - adding in a restrictions just to enable a more expensive "Unlimited" plan just doesn't make sense.

But we do have some users that want the concept of a fixed monthly bill - something that doesn't exist in the traditional business telecommunications world. Is the answer in the mobile market? Prepaid minutes? We already support free SIP calls, which is like the free in-network calling feature offered by mobile carriers. Plus, it's transparent - it's easy to know what your fixed monthly fees will be, and you can also determine out your per-minute rate, which is more important.

What's your opinion?