A Fair Use Policy That’s Fair to Everyone
For both financial and technical reasons, it’s impossible to provide a truly “unlimited” VoIP plan. Since every call through our system incurs a monetary cost, as well as a computing resources cost, we have to set a theoretical limit on what unlimited really means. Given this reality, Every VoIP vendor—CMC Network Solutions included—has something we call a “fair use policy,” or a set of guidelines explaining exactly what that theoretical upper limit is.
The standard business user rarely averages more than 45-60 minutes per business day on the phone, and a reasonable monthly average is about 15-30 hours of talk time. Except at call centers and similar phone-centric businesses, even “power callers” typically use only about 2,000 minutes per month. Accordingly, most VoIP providers set a fair use limit that’s essentially unlimited for most business users. The limit is usually about 2,000 to 3,000 minutes per month per user. If a user surpasses that limit, he or she incurs per-minute charges for any additional calls.
That may be a reasonable approach, but at CMC Network Solutions we’ve committed to doing better. We want to provide our customers with as much flexibility as possible so that they can get the most out of their telecommunications budget. We start by setting our fair use limit at 3,000 minutes per user—but we make the limit a per user average. In other words, there’s no penalty if just a handful of your company’s VoIP users exceed our fair use limit.
The fair use policies of most of our competitors kick in even if only a single user surpasses the fair use limit. But with CMC Network Solutions, you only pay extra if your company averages more than 3,000 minutes per user. In other words, if you have 15 users, you essentially have a 45,000 minute monthly fair use limit. And even if you do surpass that limit, we only charge 2.9 cents per minute for additional talk time. That’s essentially enough to cover our costs, and nothing more. By comparison, many competitors set their excess minute’s rate at .10 to .20, or even .40 or more cents per minute.
We’ve put our fair use policy in place to protect the interests of both our VoIP system and our customers. We want everyone to have the flexibility they need to run their business, but we also want to protect our VoIP service against unnecessary and excessive use. We believe that a well-maintained, efficiently utilized communications infrastructure means everyone gets the high quality of service that they depend on to run their businesses.
Like we said above, our goal is always to be fair. If you anticipate that your business will regularly surpass our fair use limit, please get in touch with us. We’re happy to work something out that’s fair to you, to us, and to all of our other customers.