Agreement For Terminal Advertising: Fill & Download for Free

From reading some of the platitudinous answers, this is clearly a topic on which I need to weigh in.Wholesale VoIP is tough for a bunch of reasons, but there are three huge ones: credit risk, arbitrage exposure and fraud.Let’s talk about how the business works for a bit before ripping into that.As a VoIP wholesaler, you are given traffic by your customers, who in doing so promise to pay you to deliver that traffic at the most current rates which you have published to them, creating a contract. You in turn have a contract for service with them, promising to terminate calls to their destinations at the advertised rate, subject to some other restrictions (such as no short-duration calls, no auto-dialers, no calling number prefix re-writing, etc).To do that, you typically operate some amount of network. In the day, that involved the equivalent of Class 4 switches, with local carrier interconnect agreements. These days, it’s all mostly IP SIP trunks, with a very very few termination carriers still running media gateways to convert VoIP to two-wire phone service for interconnect to legacy land line carriers.Your costs are denominated around your cost of network (any leased lines, IP VPN or MPLS services interconnecting your hardware, cost of hardware, operations costs, sales costs, etc) plus the costs that you pay to others for terminating your calls. It’s very, very rare for most of the intermediary wholesale VoIP carriers to own actual interconnect - because that moves you from an FCC unregulated entity to an entity regulated on both federal and state levels which is a whole level of pain you’re trying to avoid.This is where it gets interesting.The risk of arbitrage exposure comes from this little known factor called “least cost routing”. Every call that’s made, on every service that exists, is routed on the basis of what costs the originating party the least on a per-minute basis.In say Internet IP routing, the same holds - paths are computed on a “least cost” basis. However, that’s on the basis of “fewest number of hops” or sometimes “lowest round trip latency”. Not cash-money least cost. And the routing protocols auto-update. Not so in the land of voice telephony.When I was last running a wholesale VoIP carrier, some years ago, I got my rate sheets from my major termination partners in Excel spread sheets on which my engineering team would use in-house written software to load the data there into the routing matrix in our call control system. That process took an hour or so. These inbound spreadsheets had “effective at X time” rating on them, meaning that any call originated before that time would be billed at the immediate prior rate.So, my international termination partners? Rates to mobile numbers in Uzbekistan? Or VoIP in Sengal? Stuff like that? Nearly all of it came in on —- wait for it… faxes. Usually hand written. Usually at “no one is here right now” times.With rate instructions that said “effective on receipt” - with fax return receipt requested.Thus, in a world where things like this happen? You can easily find yourself, on an unexpected rate hike, suddenly being the lowest price termination advertised for a given prefix, just because you haven’t processed the change order yet.Ooops.Having already thought about this, I had automatic rate limiters in my system that call rejected inbound if I caught significant swings in calls-per-second on known expensive termination prefixes to bound my losses until I got things right. Other players in the market? Well, let’s just say one of my customers ate nearly a million bucks of termination one month - and that’s just one of the scenarios I know about.The other big risk, credit risk. is pretty self-explanatory.You have inbound traffic from someone, and they have a promise to pay. What happens when they send you a crap ton of traffic, and don’t pay? Oh, hey, you still get to pay for termination because from the contractual perspective.The way you usually handle this is with deposits, and when someone over-runs their deposit, you stop routing their traffic. Simple. It’s also easy to trust the wrong people, based on they’ve never not paid before, and get burned.I actually blew up my VoIP wholesale company on one customer running me up to nearly $300k a month, and then filing bankruptcy, with $500k open. On which I owed nearly $450k. Ooops. Again.On fraud, it’s not a risk, it’s a fact of life. There’s a pile of stuff you have to watch for. You pretty much have to budget for both detecting and being burned by it, it’s a significant cost against your already pathetic margins.Let’s just take one sterling example. There’s this bit called “traffic reclassification” - you may have inbound traffic that’s advertised as being VoIP originated, which is usually a lower rate than land line originated, and the terminating party may determine that you are actually part of a fraud chain delivering land line traffic that’s re-marked as VoiP, and then charge you after the fact for the delta.This inevitably puts you underwater on margin, so you dispute it back with your customer. The likely outcome? They bail, leaving you holding the bag for both the bill-back, and whatever they have open with you at the moment.Another example - PBX leaks. If a company has a PBX, and their security is lax, and someone hacks them and starts using them to route other traffic (traffic for which the hacker-bad-guy is making money, which is costing the PBX owner money) and all that traffic winds up in your network - and then it comes out that it’s all fraud? Well, the PBX owner is protected. But his carrier, and you? Not so much.The number of ways you can be defrauded are nearly infinite. I won’t describe them here, as I don’t want to create problems for other carriers, but man, creativity is not lacking in this field.So, to recap: you can lose your ass on taking traffic by accident at a rate that’s less than it costs you to deliver; you can lose your ass when your customer fails to pay; you can lose your ass when your customer turns out to be a bad guy or victim of a bad guy.On top of that, you have the costs of running network, and the costs of acquiring and managing customers, and regulatory overhang, and and and…I’m really glad that I did this for a couple of years; I’m equally glad I’m not doing it now. It is straight-up brutal. Not for the faint of heart.

The most common ones would be Non-Solicit (can’t employ/hire the other person’s employees, contractors, etc.) and Non-Compete (can’t work for competition).There are also other ones like Auto-Renewals (contract renews automatically until terminated) and restrictions for Termination (can only terminate with a written notice in a certain timespan). Both limit your ability to get out of the contract.You can always use Klarity to discover them.

A typical listing agreement for a residential property is generally 3–6 months.Some things to be aware of:A listing agreement is an employment contract, where the seller is employing the real estate licensee to sell the property at a price and terms they have agreed upon.There are different types of listings. For residential transactions, the most common is variously called Exclusive Authorization and Right to Sell, Exclusive Authorization, Exclusive Listing. These all mean the same thing: that whoever sells the property—in other words, procures a buyer—the listing agent has earned his or her fee. This includes the seller. An Exclusive Listing typically must have a date of termination; you can renew the listing if it expires, but you can’t just list it “until sold.” I am speaking for California laws. Other states may be different, but it bears checking.Open listing: This means that whoever actually produces a buyer will be the only one getting paid. Most agents are not interested in working on these kinds of listings.Exclusive Agency Listing: This is a type of exclusive listing that leaves the door open for the seller to sell the property him- or herself without having to pay a fee. If anyone else produces a buyer (typically another agent), the seller is liable for the feeThe length of time a listing should be in effect really has to do with the activity in the market. In the supereheated San Francisco Bay Area, for example, there is such a scarcity of inventory that properties get snapped up within days of first hitting the market, often to multiple competing offers.You do have the right to terminate a listing agreement if you don’t like the service you’re getting from your real estate agent, but be aware that you may be liable for any out-of-pocket costs they have expended on your behalf, such as for staging and advertising. All these responsibilities and obligations should be explicitly spelled out in the listing agreement you sign.If I were listing my own property today, I’d be inclined to list it for 90 days, then consider extending it one month at a time if it did not sell. I think it’s easier simply to let a listing expire then re-list with someone else than it is to have to fire an agent—but maybe that’s just me.Good luck!