How does pricing work for Telecom services?
From Bandipedia
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Pricing is complex
Pricing for telecommunications services is complex. In addition to the wide variety of telecommunications service providers (carriers) that introduce their own terminology and pricing, they may partially/completely use networks of other carriers introducing the complexity of those carriers' pricing and terminology. Even though broadband technologies such as satellite, cable, and lower-end DSL have a simple monthly rate, these services are less reliable and cannot provide the SLAs that a business gets with a T1 (or higher) for instance, so the average SMB gets stuck with in the pricing jungle and only certain carriers such as Bandwidth.com provide the automated telecom pricing system functionality and expert sales technicians to help SMBs with this problem.
What information is required from customers to price
The essential data from a customer used to determine pricing usually is at the very least the NPA-NXX or first 6 digits of the U.S. customer's phone number (NPA-NXX-XXXX). The NPA-NXX helps determine the location of the customer. Sometimes the carrier may require the address or other information (in very rare cases like remote locations, it may require the latitude/longitude). In case of a point-to-point/private line you'd need the other location's info also. The most accurate pricing done by carriers will actually determine the whether the building the customer is located in is "lit" or not (already has an existing loop to another customer in that same building) because lit buildings usually mean a cheaper rate for the customer. The latter kind of pricing basically requires that the carrier match the customers address to a database of lit building addresses, and since some carriers have manually entered addresses that weren't scrubbed against the US Postal Database, it makes it difficult to compare a customer's street address "158 West Parker Avenue South, Suite 120" to something that had to be entered in some mainframe terminal to fit into a fixed size field like "158 W PARKER AVE". Finally if you need additional wiring done from your demarcation point in the building to the floor you are on, they may need to even know what floor your business in on in that building.
Loop and port
Central concepts to telecom pricing of Fractional T1 and up are the loop rate and the port rate. The loop rate is the part of the cost involving the carrier that delivers the local loop, or the line from the demarcation point of your building to the (usually closest) central office of the loop provider (carrier). The local loop is sometimes/often not provided by the carrier that you originally initiated pricing with (they usually are only the port provider). The port rate part of the cost is to get you from that central office mentioned previously to "the net" or to another location in case of point-to-point/private line, for instance. Other prices you may encounter are interconnectivity price (for point-to-point/private line) which is basically due to having to connect your one business location to another without just going "wild-west" out on the net.
What goes on behind the scenes
There are a wide variety of ways that carriers actually go about the business of handling pricing. Some carriers' sales reps just manage their pricing in one or more spreadsheets or use some software application to help with pricing. These reps typically handle communication with customers/agents/wholesalers/partners via email, phone, fax, or instant messaging and turn around on pricing can sometimes be slow. Other carriers may have intranets with web-based interfaces that the carrier sales reps can use, but no one else can. In that case also, as a customer/agent/wholesaler/partner, you are having to deal with a person (the carrier sales rep) to get information, so it can be similarly slow. A number of carriers have partner extranets that allow agents/wholesalers/partners to price up connectivity on their own. However, they typically don't open these up to customers. And there are APIs, Webservices, etc. for direct system-to-system pricing that carriers provide to agents/wholesalers/partners that allow for very easy integration so that the agents/wholesalers/partners with enough IT/development resources can use to price, sometimes sell, or sometimes even manage trouble-tickets. In addition, there are all kinds of promotions involved and marketing material provided to customers. All of this equals complexity to the Nth degree. A company such as Bandwidth.com is able to hide this complexity through well-educated sales reps and smart automated pricing systems that access those spreadsheets, those partner extranets, and APIs/webservices to provide customers with quick and accurate pricing.
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