The world of telecom changed forever in October, 2008 when QWEST lead the industry by assessing a fee on short duration calls.  The fee had been in many contracts for years; however, it was never enforced.  The logic behind it was that a call might take up 30 seconds of network time before the person at the far end ever picked up and the billable time started.  That seems like nothing, but when looking at a long distance network, and tallying up all of the un-billable time verses the revenue on the calls, something had to be done.  The customers with the largest volume of short duration calls were telemarketers, who may have 50 - 60% of their calls only billing for 6 seconds or less.

Many resellers fought the policy, and many end users fled to other carriers.  In the end, almost every major carrier now has and enforces their short duration call policy.  Ours matches the industry standard and protects us from these carrier charges that would otherwise make some of our customers unprofitable.

ATI Short Duration Call (SDC) Policy:

The ATI short Duration Call (SDC) policy pertains to all domestic calls.  International calls as well as domestic Directory Assistance (DA) calls are not included in call totals as International calls already have a 30 second minimum billable duration and DA calls are billed – not by a per-minute fee but by a per-use fee.  All remaining domestic calls, both 1+ and toll-free, regardless of their domestic jurisdiction are used in the SDC calculation.

The SDC fee is assessed at the Customer Account (or location) level.  If a customer has 4 locations, the SDC fees are tallied and determined by the individual sites, and not as an aggregate of all locations. 

A Short Duration Call is identified as any call with a duration of 6 seconds or less (0.1 minutes).  The aggregate volume of calls are counted and matched against the quantity of short duration calls to determine the overall percentage.  If the total is less than 10% of the total call volume, the SDC fee is not assessed.  If the SDC percentage is OVER 10%, a $0.01 (one penny) per call surcharge is applied for every SDC over the 10% threshold.  Below is an example of the calculations. 

Customer_ID	Good	Short	Total	% SDC	Exposure	10%
Cust. Loc 1	80	-	80	0.0%	0	8.00
Cust. Loc 2	187,145	176,310	363,455	48.5%	$1,399.65	36,345.50
Cust. Loc 3	190,197	151,656	341,853	44.4%	$1,174.71	34,185.30

The final column identifies the total amount of SDCs that are acceptable for the total volume of calls.  The difference between this number and the total SDCs listed in the third column labeled “Short” identifies the number of calls that are assessed the 1 penny per call surcharge that is totaled in the “Exposure” column.

We will determine your SDC percentage when analyzing your traffic profile and bring this issue to your attention if you are near the threshold.  Telemarketers have the greatest exposure to this fee as the nature of their calling campaigns frequently cause them to instantly disconnect calls if a voicemail is reached.  The SDC percentage for a normal (non-telemarketing) company is around 3% and SDC fees would not be applicable.