Ouch! VoicePulse policy

I'm moving a customer from toll-free DID to local DIDs. We decided to try VoicePulse, a service I'd used earlier. He made an account and I configured his Asterisk machine for it. It worked. He added numbers to the account and they automatically worked with the single registration. It was up to my customer to decide which numbers to get and he could administer those without touching the Asterisk configuration. Slick.

However...today there was a strange outage at VoicePulse and while I had a tech on the line I decided to clarify a concern I had over this FAQ answer.

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problem was with "accounts have a total of 4 channels". I was assuming that each time we added a new number (for $11, the same as we'd pay for a new account) we'd get another 4 channels allocated. Surprise! It doesn't work that way.

No, really...you mean I was going to have 20 numbers at $11 * 20 = $220 and I'd only get 4 simultaneous channels for all of those? Yes, but the recommended way around it is to buy extra channels at $20 each.

Well, let's see...I could get 20 *accounts* with a single number each for $220 and have four channels per number. Or I could have one account and buy 76 additional channels for $1740. Hmmm...$220 or $1740 per month?

Having lots of accounts is going to be a real pain but $1520/month is worth a little effort. Beware if you were thinking of using VoicePulse with a bunch of DIDs.

Other than this issue and the outage this morning I like VoicePulse.

--kyler

Reply to
Kyler Laird
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I think you found their trick for separating home users from business users. Luckily you are running a very flexible pbx and can take advantage of the low per-phonenumber price and don't have to buy expensive extra channels.

Just out of curiosity where is $11/mo plan on their web site. I only see 3 plans at $27/$16/$49 per month.

Are you sure you need more than 20 channels total? Phone companies normally have these tables for how many simultaneous lines you can expect in use. Unless we are talking about a call-center or phone-spamming operation (and I assume you wouldn't be involved with the latter!), I'd expect much less than half the lines to be in use.

If we are talking consulting wages and the hassle of just logging into

20 different accounts at voicepulse to fund them and set the passwords we are already talking several hours monkey-work. It might save money to just get 10 channels and be done with it.

-wolfgang

Reply to
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht

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My problem was with "accounts have a total of 4 channels". I was

Yuck... I wouldn't use them at all if this is the case.

Reply to
Jonathan Roberts

Amen.

Reply to
DevilsPGD

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