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Calling Cards: The Biggest Telephony Business Opportunity

2008-Mar-26, 12:24

The calling cards works on a pre-paid system, where you can access the telephony service immediately with a certain value of currency in your card. In other words, it can be said that a calling card is a communication credit card that is used by the consumers to avail telephony services.

If you want to talk to your friends and family members overseas, and you need immediate credit to call on a specific country for a short period, then calling card would be a right option for you. You can easily go for international calling cards, which would help you to make a call in almost any country of the world with any handset.

It is advisable to go for the region specific calling cards by which you can save a significant amount of money. Suppose that you have to talk exclusively to Caribbean then, you should buy a card meant for that specific Caribbean region only, which can help you save up to 40 percent on the call charges.

The calling cards come in cheaper rates because the calling card providers purchase the call credits in huge amount from the major telecommunication companies, with a huge discount, and they pass this benefit to the end users as well.

One of the great advantages with a calling card is that you are aware of your spending and that also where you are spending that amount. This is almost similar to pay-as you-go mobile phones and you can avail a minimum call credit of £5 as well.

Undoubtedly, calling cards will pave a way for growth in the saturated UK telephone market. Nowadays, free phone cards are also offered to attract the customers. In the coming years, calling cards will become the biggest telephony business opportunity in UK.

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The VAR Route to VoIP

2008-Jan-1, 02:04

A hot new driver of growth in low-end VoIP applications is emerging. The key players go by names such as value-added resellers (VARs), system integrators, IT consultants and the like. Usually small businesses themselves, they’ve been helping other small businesses with their technology needs for a long time.


In the past, such businesses — we’ll call them all VARs, for convenience — might have helped their customers only with computers and data networks, or perhaps only with traditional phone systems such as TDM PBXs. Now they’re adding VoIP to their acts. Doing so often fills a hole in their business models, and represents a new route by which VoIP can proliferate in small companies.

One significant part of this emerging market involves hosted Internet-based IP PBX services. These offer the ease and convenience of traditional Centrex services, but add all the modern advantages of VoIP. Suppliers of such services include Packet8 and Vocalocity. All a small business needs is a broadband connection and an IP phone to get enterprise-level features and flexibility. The package also delivers the cost savings that made Internet telephony famous in the first place.

The other main part of the market involves open source IP PBXs. VARs load Asterisk packages onto Linux servers, install them in their customers’ premises, set them up and keep them running. Fonality’s open source trixbox is an example of such software. VARs used to download it and put it on servers themselves. Now they can buy it from trixbox owner Fonality, preloaded on a server, in the form of a bright green trixbox appliance.

The hosted model has significant attractions for VARs. The biggest may be that it provides recurring revenues. VARs’ incomes no longer have to depend on upfront revenues for integrating and installing hardware, an approach that provides only inconsistent fees for maintenance or reconfigurations later. Rather, they can, as resellers, get paid a fee every month as long as the customer uses the service.

That doesn’t mean it will replace their existing business, rather it will augment it, according to Vocalocity channel manager Brian Koles. “We’re finding this kind of hosted PBX helps fill in the gaps where the existing solution sets haven’t been able to sell very well,” he says. “It has sort of created a new revenue space without replacing what a lot of the VARs and telecom brokers, as well as some of the IT consultants, have already been selling.”

The premise-based approach also holds attraction for sometimes-skittish small business customers of VARs. For one thing, it gives them the option of sticking with analog connections. Instead of having their calls come in and go out over the Internet via a VoIP provider, they can hook their IP PBXs to their existing standard incoming phone lines. That means they don’t have to rely solely on the Internet for all their calling needs. That may help persuade those still leery of Internet telephony quality, while still providing them with the advantages of VoIP switching.

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International Calling Cards - The Best Way To Earn More!

2007-Dec-19, 08:05

Making international or long distance calls through your standard phone lines or public switch telephony network is enough to create a deep rip in your pocket. If you are a frequent traveler or if you have friends and families staying overseas, your trouble will only escalate further with your telephony expenditure rising due to frequent international calling. International calling cards is one option that you can rely on for making long distance calls.

Why Calling Cards?

Understanding Calling cards is no rocket science and chances are you would have most probably heard about them or used them too. A calling card is a sort of a telecommunication credit card through which you can make long distance calling at cost effective rates. By using a calling card instead of a hotel's phone service or your standard phone, he surcharges are waived off.

Prepaid phone cards can be purchased from a calling card service provider and is available for different affordable denominations. For instance 5$,10$, 20$ and so on. You can make calls worth the amount of the calling cards. One of the prime reasons for their growing popularity is that through the same card you can make international calls too besides making long distance domestic calls. Also prepaid calling cards are very small in size and therefore it is extremely easy to carry them with you where ever you go.

Increasing Your Revenue Generation Through Calling Cards

The market for phone cards is red hot right now and this is the best time to start selling this little piece of paper that is capable of tremendously increasing your revenue. If you are looking to step into the fast rising IP telephony sector then calling cards could well provide you with a very profitable solution.

Nowadays an even better preposition is put forth by certain providers dealing with VoIP enabled services. The provider would provide you with entire infrastructure and technical equipments or hardware needed to generate calling cards and PIN numbers. Thereby your investment in the business minimises substantially and so does the risk factor.

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Selling Prepaid Phone Cards - How Lucrative Is It?

2007-Dec-13, 12:55

A lot of individuals today wish they could start their own businesses. Selling prepaid phone cards would make a nice start to a viable business proposition. Getting into this business should be quite easy and could convert your dreams into reality. However, there is a very wide gap between truth and fiction. Your goals, whatever the may be, can only be achieved with meticulous planning.

As a home-based, online or standard entrepreneur, you will need to have a plan to avoid pitfalls, to achieve your goals, and to establish a profitable business venture. As a phone card seller, you need to create a viable business plan to avoid stumbling blocks, achieve your goals, and build a profitable home business, such as selling prepaid phone cards.

Find Out What Services Your Distributor Would Offer

Before you start selling, it's important to inquire from your service provider if they provide customizable business management, or web-based platforms to the wholesale agents, where you could:

- Set your own rates for their customers.

- Create different rate plans with different billing increments (rounding to seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute etc.), impose connection and disconnection charges, monthly fees and other parameters. Check if billing can be done in a local currency.

- Credit and charge amounts to/from accounts

- Configure postpaid or prepaid billing types for the customers

- View the billing and errors for each account

- Configure speed dial numbers or services for the customers

- Generate pin codes for calling cards

The Mechanism Of Prepaid Phone Cards

Prospective retailers should have a wider grasp of the business they are going into. They should know that prepaid phone cards come in different dollar denominations, or face values, which are often between $5, $10 or $25 per card. They may also be packaged in minutes, such as 30, 60, or 90 minutes per card.

The cards available often charge different per-minute rates. Before you sell cards, ask your distributor the details about how many minutes of calling time in the cards. With some cards, when you buy more minutes, you get a better per-minute price. Instead of minutes, some operators indicate how many "units" are on the card.

A unit equals one minute calling time for calls placed within the continental United States. On calls from territories like Puerto Rico and Guam and to other countries, you may be charged more than one unit for every minute you are on the phone. Knowing these details helps in properly informing the buying public about the characteristics of prepaid call cards.

Phone Cards Use VoIP Technology

The main reason why phone cards are able offer very affordable rates to call local or overseas is because of the unique technology used. Service providers selling phone cards use a combination of VoIP (Voice over IP) and regular lines to get a fairly good balance between call quality and low prices. In addition, since the cards are pre-paid, which means you pay in advance for the specified talk time, other charges are reduced, like the ones for collection charges or debt retrieval.


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