A note about front page minutes

You may have noticed the minutes on the front page display dropping.

Don't worry, we do have revenue coming in, but the application that adds it in only runs once a month (this is due to the way that Telco's deal with invoices from other Telco's and the time delay in between a call and being paid for a call).

I'm actually working on the application which runs on the server and manages this at the moment, and hope to have it a bit more "real time" sometime next week.

Dean

Ahh, that's cool - a more real time display would be interesting - I thought that's what the current one was and it was steadily going down.

So working it out roughly, do you think the books are balancing so far or is it hard to tell?

--ian

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So working it out roughly, do you think the books are balancing so far or is it hard to tell?

Kind of hard to tell over this short period of time (say, four days now since we came out of beta) but yes, so far, I would say we're balancing up nicely. Looking manually at the call records I can see that everyone is behaving pretty well. We have enough in the kitty to keep things rolling on for quite a while as the system settles down. We anticipate an initial surge of excitement and outbound call making anyway.....

I think we'll know better though when we have about a 14 day run at this, and I can run some automated queries over the call records database.

We'll also be putting the call record database online, so everyone will get a kind of itemised call record on their account, for inbound and outbound which I think people will find quite interesting (you beta testers will get that shortly). It will also enable members to login themselves and see how their account looks on a community level.

The display on the front page will become more and more realtime. At the moment it works on a simple maths formula based on an average outbound call cost, and I may have picked an average figure that turns out to be incorrect (I was deliberately conservative with it). As we go on, and compare the actual records with the projected, we'll get more accurate with it.

Dean

dean :

but yes, so far, I would say we're balancing up nicely.

Great!

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We'll also be putting the call record database online, so everyone will get a kind of itemised call record on their account, for inbound and outbound which I think people will find quite interesting (you beta testers will get that shortly). It will also enable members to login themselves and see how their account looks on a community level. The display on the front page will become more and more realtime.

Ah, that sounds good.

--ian

Update part 2:

Everything is ticking along nicely - we really appreciate the fact that people are being fair and reasonable with outbound useage, that really does help. So far we haven't had to change a thing (books are balanced) so it seems our systems are all working.

Thanks guys, hope you're enjoying it, and taking the opportunity to experiment and try different things out.

There may be a few changes over the next week or two, but nothing major:-

1. We're thinking of reducing the 90 min maximum call time - hardly any calls of that kind of length have been made anyway, and this was really just a safety mechanism in case anyone left the phone off the hook in error. I think we can safely reduce it to 60 minutes and no-one will really notice. We'd like this as low as we feel we can put it, for obvious reasons.

2. User configurable caller ID has proved a little more tricky for technical reasons than we first thought. We've got a solution to make it work though, it might just take a little while.

3. The front page minutes display is still not 100% real-time, in fact, we haven't actually added any of the latest inbound minutes to it yet (which if we did would take it to a shade over 75,000). Again, a few technical difficulties, but we'll overcome those.

4. Hand in hand with #3 above is the Call Data Records for each account which, again, we'll get sorted. It's just a case of building and testing what we've worked out we need to do (database/Cisco switch data integration).

Dean

How about some nice little graphs about usage....

...detailing also the trend of the available minutes pot.


Peter

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How about some nice little graphs about usage....

We'd rather concentrate our efforts on functionality at the moment.

BTW : I saw your post in the other forum about inbound numbers in other countries - we've been actively looking into that for some time now. There is a thread about it around here someplace...

Dean

dean :

There is a thread about it around here someplace...

We're going very off-thread, but ...

http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_159.html

--ian

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1. We're thinking of reducing the 90 min maximum call time - hardly any calls of that kind of length have been made anyway, and this was really just a safety mechanism in case anyone left the phone off the hook in error. I think we can safely reduce it to 60 minutes and no-one will really notice. We'd like this as low as we feel we can put it, for obvious reasons.

When the 90 minutes are up, do you get any warning that you are going to be cut off or do you get the pips like with payphones?

Whilst there may not be many many calls over 1 hour, there may be the odd occation where it might be useful to keep the 90 minute rule as it is. If I intend to make a long call I would use a service which I would pay for (still less than £1 with sipgate) but if I intended to make a shortish call say to a client and in that conversation they wanted to tell me about a new piece of work, I would prefer not to get cut off.

Could it be dependent on the call cost rather than time perhaps?

Dave

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When the 90 minutes are up, do you get any warning that you are going to be cut off r do you get the pips like with payphones?

You get pips just like a payphone (at 60 seconds left and 10 seconds left).

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Could it be dependent on the call cost rather than time perhaps?

I don't think we can set that per call at the switch end, but I'll look into it.

Dean

dean :

You get pips just like a payphone (at 60 seconds left and 10 seconds left).

humm, please help! - I hear the pips but I can't seem to find the slot to put the 10p.....

Sorry, couldn't resist! *grin*

--ian

[quote="dave"]

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Whilst there may not be many many calls over 1 hour, there may be the odd occation where it might be useful to keep the 90 minute rule as it is. If I intend to make a long call I would use a service which I would pay for (still less than £1 with sipgate) but if I intended to make a shortish call say to a client and in that conversation they wanted to tell me about a new piece of work, I would prefer not to get cut off.

... gives you a great in to mention Voice-over-IP and you can tell your callee that VoIP works just great, as, he's just talked to you for 60-90 minutes using it.

I guess that depends if you're in a tech business or not. I know I've mentioned that I've been using voip to a couple of customers... one of which then went on to tell me more about his departments intentions for voip....

Why not setup a paypal account so the caller like me can donate money? Someone like me don't use the 844 number, the donation is the only way I can help to keep the balance.

I am new to this stuff. I am just curious to understand how this community generates "revenue" from incoming calls that are free?

I learned about this while reading about how the "outbound service" is funded.

I hope someone can enlighten me this topic becuase I have heard of similar services in the US.

Thanks,

p2pvoice

p2pvoice :

I am new to this stuff. I am just curious to understand how this community generates "revenue" from incoming calls that are free?

Incoming calls are not free. If you dial an 0870 number, you are getting charged by your phone provider - part of this charge goes to the owner of the 0870 number.

So, if you dial a voipuser.org 0870 number, voipuser.org get a small amount of the call cost per minute - they then use this to provide the sip outbound service.

--ian