Troubleshooting International Calls

From your perspective, troubleshooting an international call is just like troubleshooting a domestic call. You can run through the switched outbound troubleshooting steps in Chapter 12 and isolate the issue just as if you were calling Newark, New Jersey. The only twist to troubleshooting international calls is that you might find some interesting similarities when you try your call over other carriers.

The reason for call treatment similarities is because your long-distance carrier doesn’t use its own network to complete calls to every country in the world. I can guarantee you that MCI, Sprint, and AT&T don’t own all the cables, hardware, and have a staff of technicians around the world to connect your calls into Senegal, Papua New Guinea, and India. Your long-distance provider uses an underlying carrier, a company specifically designed for delivering international calls from the U.S. to a specific country or region in the world. The interesting thing is that there are only so many underlying carriers that provide service into each country, and every large domestic long-distance carrier probably has a contract for service with every large under-lying carrier. In other words, more than one long-distance carrier is using the same path to complete calls to Gifu, Japan, or Prague, Czech Republic.

 Technical Stuff  Carriers monitor their completion rates daily to every country in the world. If you try hard enough, your long-distance carrier might even send you the list of what they consider acceptable completion rates. Don’t be shocked if you see that a completion rate of 60 percent to Western Europe is acceptable; the rate drops to around 7 percent or less for some African countries.

 Tip  Your long-distance carrier can route your international calls over several underlying carriers. The choice of underlying carrier depends on the underlying carrier’s completion ratios compared with all the other carrier choices at that time, as well as the price you are paying for your international calls. Some carriers have a premium group of underlying carriers available for international calls, but they can’t place you on that group of carriers because they would lose money. If your business is focused on international calling, you might be better served by paying a few pennies more per minute for your calls, if you can realize a better call quality or completion rate. If you are opening more than one trouble ticket every few months on international issues, speak to your carrier about a better route.