The world of business becomes smaller every day—the Internet allows us to set-up video conferences with anyone on the other side of the world at a moment’s notice.
Despite this, the phone call is still a key tool for businesses connecting with their customers, partners, suppliers and investors without concern for national borders. Just as mobile services and Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs) like Phone.com have all but eliminated domestic long-distance telephone charges, so too are we seeing an evolution in how international calling is treated.
Phone.com includes international destinations like Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom in our standard packages. That means customers with usage-sensitive service would be billed the same rate for calls to these countries as they would for calls within the United States. And customers with unlimited service pay nothing extra for calls to these countries! That is a far cry from those special, but very expensive, calls we made back in the day to wish Grandma a happy birthday in Paris!
One of the challenges facing providers like Phone.com is long-distance calling fraud. We’re all aware of personal identity theft, but do you know how much it impacts phone-service providers? In 2013, long-distance toll calling fraud cost carriers worldwide more than $46 billion annually. Because of this, many providers keep their direct-dialed international calling rates high to make up for losses due to fraud. Hardly fair, is it? At Phone.com, we constantly re-examine our pricing to customers for international calling and reduce our prices wherever possible.
That said, we need the help of our customers to reduce unauthorized use. If your account has international calling enabled, be sure to advise your employees of your policies on the use of your phone service, especially as it relates to international calling. Employees need to know that international calls are to be used for business purposes only.
At Phone.com, we do our part to block intruders from running up fraudulent and unauthorized calls but the effort is, by nature, ongoing and evolving! Hackers use new malware or other avenues of attack, and we need to be ever vigilant.
Also, we constantly strive to meet the needs of our customers. If there are international calling destinations that are important to you, please let us know and we will work hard to provide the most professional and reliable cloud-based phone service on the planet- who lets you call anywhere on the planet!