Just go to the website, put in the phone number and call.
From what I've experienced with my relatives overseas this is something that's really needed and something they have not been able to find.
So how are you going to stay viable in 3 to 5 years?
> Just go to the website, put in the phone number and call.
Ok, there are a million WebRTC betas out there right now to use for free, even AT&T offered one for the past 2 years up until they killed their WebRTC program in January.
> From what I've experienced with my relatives overseas this is something that's really needed and something they have not been able to find.
Sure, but once again to maintain viability, you need to offer something unique, telecom is a very competitive space, and to scale it you need to build key relationships. Setting up a WebRTC client is awesome, but they are a dime a dozen currently.
But, the current plan is to charge the businesses that want to receive calls from their international customers for tracking and control.
We can allow the businesses to have branded links that auto-dial their number that they can share on their website, email, etc. With these they can also track the source of the caller, do call recording, and route the calls how they want.
For travel businesses, for example, that do business with primarily customers outside their country this is a problem that we can solve for them. Most people would never dial an international number, but they'll click a link and make a free call from their browser.
Eh, if you avoid Level 3 and Bandwidth.com directly, and go to a wholesaler like Endstream, you won't need any volume. Just throw $20 in your account every few months and you should be good.
> But, the current plan is to charge the businesses that want to receive calls from their international customers for tracking and control.
Mmm, you could totes do this, make sure to use Opus and pitch it as Full HD Audio (better than that tin can HD that carriers are pushing now). Grandstream supports Opus straight to their deskphones by the way, so you may wanna look at them. Their middling quality, but rock bottom price wise.
> branded links that auto-dial their number ... track the source of the caller
How do you plan to get the caller's name?
Also, travel businesses might be a viable model for this, I'd just encourage you to think outside the box, what other areas could use this kind of service?
I'll look into those providers and see what I can set up. If I can get the costs down by an order of magnitude that would obviously be amazing.
As for tracking the source of the caller, I'm not talking about their name but how they came to the website to that then generated the call. Whether thats though organic search, PPC, advertising, some random forum post, etc. It's a lot easier to get exact referral information when the call is a web event rather than an actual phone call.
https://www.sipnet.net/services/webrtc https://ievaphone.com/
On the first one my calls just fail for no reason. And on the second one my call is limited to 5 minutes and it looks like they only allow a certain number of calls per day.
That's the issue. There's a ton of "demos" of this online but nobody that actually takes it seriously or makes any effort to really refine the experience as a core of their product. That's exactly what I want to do.
Have you considered that maybe there is a good reason that your competitors have these restrictions? For example, because scammers might abuse your service by pretending to be the IRS?
http://www.npr.org/2016/05/20/478886076/money-transfer-compa... http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/01/29/464859624/episo...
Granted, these are really heavy-handed ways to solve this problem. There might be better ones, like using machine learning or something.
However, I also believe that this is something that can be handled while also providing a good experience for real users.
I've run other web telephony businesses for several years now and those get hit by scammers at least once a month, but I've learned how to automatically block them out. I'm sure there's a way to do that here as well.
Without money to encourage you to spend time on it, how are you going to refine the experience? How are you going to refine the experience? Debugging browser incompatibility issues with non-Evergreen browsers sounds like a nightmare to me, and is part of what holds back WebRTC today.
It could be offering HD Voice interop with AT&T/VZW/T-Mo, selling user verified CNAM, or anything that adds value you can't get elsewhere.
I'd just avoid trying to become a voice wholesaler, its a very competitive space filled by a bunch of hyper competitive sub-5 person businesses that are super nimble due to their size. Most are pushing a few tens of millions of minutes a month.