Custom Rate Deck
At VI, we allow customers to customize their own rate decks. With this feature, customers can now look at stats for a specific underlying carrier and remove them from routes if they desire. VoIP Innovations strives to work with only quality vendors whether that be for inbound and outbound calling or ancillary services such as 411, 911, or T.38. We have an internal staff member devoted solely to carrier relations. At times, we have had issues with specific vendors and have severed relationships because they cannot meet the high standards we set forth for our customers. Nevertheless, we also understand that there are sometimes compatibility issues between our customers and our vendors. For example, perhaps your switch is hard-coded to use a Ptime of 30ms but a specific carrier of ours can only use the industry standard of 20ms. As this scenario is ripe for audio issues, having a customizable rate deck on your account solves this problem for you. Similarly, perhaps you are having trouble reaching a specific rural area resulting in Post Dial Delay (PDD). One carrier may be having trouble terminating to one area but otherwise has stellar stats. Rather than VI removing that carrier from all routing, we allow our customers to remove that carrier from only their routing. A customized Rate Deck will allow you to include or exclude certain carriers based on their statistics. Rather than switching to a more expensive rate deck to fix a quality issue, you can now simply exclude a carrier that is having issues.
We have configured the Customizable Rate Deck feature into four defined Presets and three Tiers. Tier One carriers are those carriers that support T.38 and are our top tier carriers. Tier Two carriers are just a step below this and are also considered top tier carriers. Tier Three carriers are what we use for our LCR rate deck. You can choose to block all or only some of the carriers in a specific tier. Keep in mind that all call routing at VI is set for least cost first, meaning that if you wanted to guarantee that your calls only used Tier One carriers, you would need to block tiers two and three. That's not to say that using all three tiers means none of your calls will traverse a Tier One carrier but the calls will be less likely to hit their route due to the higher cost. That is the beauty of the Customizable Rate Deck; we place the choice in your hands. If you are interested in utilizing the custom rate deck, we suggest keeping all carriers in route to start and then adjusting as you monitor your traffic. You can view pricing for the Custom Rate decks under Billing->Packages and Pricing > Termination in the Back Office. Keep in mind that rate increases from our carriers affect the Custom Rate Deck feature. We track these changes for you and keep a history.
You can obtain this information by hovering the Term tab in the Back Office and selecting Custom Rate Deck->Rates. The resulting page will list all the rate deck changes and the date it was modified. You will want to ensure you are viewing the most current information regarding pricing so be aware of this. To view rates, you can click the Download based on the Last Modified date. Since VoIP Innovations bills off LRN for conversational traffic, we suggest obtaining the rate from the LRN Lookup Tool. The Presets we have in place also add a level of control to you. The default
Preset is Standard which includes all carriers in all tiers. The Enterprise Preset includes only Tier One and Tier Two Network carriers and the Premium Preset includes only Tier One Network carriers. We
have also created a fourth Preset labeled LCR. This is for resellers who truly use a Least Cost Routing system. This Preset contains only one carrier for each route. IF that one carrier fails the call, we return a SIP 503 thus failing the call to you for route advancement in your LCR system. Each Preset has a pop-up hover text that describes the preset if you happen to forget this information. Screen shots of these are included below as well.
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