We have extended the validity of the Quarter Calls plan to 60 days from last recharge.

Now whenever you buy Quarter Calls credit or add more credit to your balance, you will have 60 days to use it. We originally had a 30 day validity in effect, but have decided to increase it at the request of our customers. This extension took place last week and will automatically affect all Quarter Call customers with an active balance.

The new overage rate on calls is 1.9 cents per minute. This is a 2 cent per minute drop from our previous overage rate of 3.9 cents per minute.

In addition to lowering the overage rate, we have also adjusted most negative balances downwards to reflect what your calls would have cost at 1.9 cents per minute instead of at 3.9 cents per minute. To see if your balance has been lowered, check the Reporting tool in your account for something that looks like this:

If you have a balance and it was not adjusted, it was because you owe us for prior month’s calls or your account did not renew properly. We are in the process of reaching out to a couple hundred accounts that fit this description.

Finally we are adjusting credit limits so that the highest credit limit you can have is $4. If your credit limit is below that, it will not be changed.

We are taking these steps for several reasons:

1. The overage rate was too high and needed to come down. 3.9 cents was a relic from when we it used to cost that much wholesale to call India.

2. Balances were lowered to reflect the new overage rate of 1.9 cents per minute. This needed to be done so that paying off your balance via Top Up worked properly.

3. We are standardizing the credit limit values on all of our plans. This makes it easier for us to manage accounts when people switch from one plan to another. Also the Top Up tool’s ability to buy more minutes eliminates the need for large credit limits.

If you are not familiar with it, here is a quick recap of our credit limit and overage rate:

IndiaLD gives each account a credit limit that allows them to make calls if they use up their monthly packaged minutes. Calls made using this credit limit are charged at an overage rate that is higher than your normal per minute charge. When you make calls using your credit limit, you accrue a negative balance. At the end of your month, we charge your account for this negative balance.

The credit limit and overage rate are relics from before we had Top Up. Back in 2009, if you ran out of minutes the credit limit was the only way you could keep making calls. Some people still use it for convenience sake, but the majority of our customers now use the Top Up tool instead to buy extra minutes.

This is one of a series of steps that are taking to simplify having an IndiaLD account. As we keep getting bigger, it’s important for us to make sure that we become more efficient in how we manage our customer base. Look for more changes out of us over the coming months that will make IndiaLD not only the cheapest way to call India, but the simplest as well.

Chris

Good news if you are one of our customers with an Aircel fixed minute plan. We have added an upgrade downgrade facility to the website so that you can automatically upgrade or downgrade your plan yourself.

To do this, login to the website, click on the Upgrade/Downgrade link and select the plan you want to move into. This will work for anyone who has an Aircel 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, or 3000 minute plan and wants to change to a lower or higher monthly minute plan.

This feature does not cover our Happy Hour, 1 to 1 Unlimited, or Unlimited Calling Circle plans. If you want to switch into or out of one of those, you will still need to contact customer service.

We have increased capacity with our second access number provider from 300 channels to 1300 channels. This means that the (323) 500-4030 access number can now handle 1000 more simultaneous phone calls than it could last week. It also means that we are assigning personal access numbers and easy dialers for our new customers on to this network.

IndiaLD now has the capacity to take 3200 simultaneous phone calls over two different networks in the USA during peak calling times. We had 2100 simultaneous calls last Sunday when we ran into our fast busy signal issue, and expect this to be plenty of capacity.

We went into last weekend believing that we were provisioned for 2650 simultaneous calls on our primary access number provider, and with 300 simultaneous calls on our secondary access number. That should have allowed us to take 2950 simultaneous USA calls. Sunday, my jaw dropped when I watched our traffic peak at 1800 simultaneous calls on our primary provider and fast busy problems started. Our secondary which had room for 300 simultaneous also maxed out.

We had spent a lot of time working with these guys over the prior week to reallocate our traffic down to LA based numbers where we had excess capacity and plenty of room to handle calls. It broke my heart to see that the problem continued into the weekend. After we spend hours with them on the phone Sunday night, they discovered an upstream limitation in the maximum number of calls that were able to deliver to us. Un#*@ing real. To say we were upset is an understatement. You need to realize this is the largest exchange carrier in the west, and generally a very competent business through whom we have delivered probably a billion minutes worth of calls. How they missed this is beyond me. I am sorry that you as customers had to suffer.

Going forward, we are working with our primary provider to get additional capacity opened to us during non peak business hours. What works well is that our peaks and their normal business peak traffic are very different. Our customers call early morning and late evening, while the rest of their customers mostly are business hour callers.

We are also looking to add a third access number provider to spread our traffic out even further as we grow.

In the short term, we are going to hard tag 619 345-8800 and tell those customers to call 323 500-4030 just so that we can get some additional traffic off our primary provider and on to our secondary provider.

If you get a fast busy this weekend, please call us on (323) 500-4030. There will be room for you there. We are hoping to have the bursting capacity with our primary by the weekend rush and to have moved traffic from the primary to the secondary, but if that does not happen, please use the access number on our secondary.

I will make another post about this in the near future, but we are also switching our customer service providers in order to better scale up to meet your needs. We are 10 days into the transition and seeing a lot of positive results. Please bear with us while we get those agents fully up to speed.

Chris

Hi,

We just want to let all of our customers on the Aircel fixed minute and Unlimited Calling Circle plans know that you can now use the Top Up tool on the website to buy additional minutes for your account. To do this, just login to your account and look for the Top Up box located at the bottom of the page:

You can buy blocks of minutes starting at 100 minutes up to 1000 minutes. You will pay the same price per minute for Top Up minutes as your monthly minutes cost. For the Unlimited Calling Circle customers, you can add to the 1000 minutes you get to call India for 1.1 cents per minute.

Top Up is available for:

Aircel 500
Aircel 1000
Aircel 1500
Aircel 2000
Aircel Unlimited Calling Circle

Here is the explanation for what happened to our USA access numbers today:

Downtime: 45 Minutes
Area Affected: USA
Impact: Primary access numbers only allowed intermittent connections.
Compensation: 90 free minutes for each USA account, 3 million minutes total.

As you may know, our access number provider added additional capacity to our access numbers on Friday. This was necessary to handle the growing amount of traffic on our system. When they added this capacity, a technician accidentally changed the routing scheme that is used to send SIP connections from their trunks to our colo facility. The change in the routing rules resulted in our router getting flooded with connection requests and not rolling those requests over to our other servers.

In a nutshell, our router was getting sent inbound calls in a less efficient manner than it is used to. When we hit our Saturday peak, the router was not able to process all of those calls. Furthermore, the fail over method we use could not kick in because it too did not understand what the incoming requests were saying. We are working closely with our provider to prevent this from happening again.

I was in the park with my daughter when I got the first Facebook notification we were down. 45 minutes later our techs had the issue resolved. One of them was getting ready for his girlfriend’s college graduation (Sorry Hollee and congrats!) and the other had just landed at LAX. Thanks to them and our access number provider’s NOC, we had the problem fixed quickly.

To make up for being down during this peak period, I have added 90 minutes of free calling to the accounts of all active USA customers. If you are on a fixed minute plan, your packaged balance has 90 more minutes. If you are on the 1.5 cent calling card, your balance has an extra $1.35 on it. If you are on Quarter Calls, your balance has an extra $1.25 minutes.

In total, I just gave away over 3 million minutes of free calling. My partners will probably kill me for this or dock my pay severely, but its important for IndiaLD to let all of you know how much we value your business. This is especially true for all of our new customers who haven’t enjoyed hundreds of hours of calling to India with us yet.

If you were one of the callers who was affected this morning, please accept these minutes as our apology.

If you were not affected this morning and are just finding out about this now, enjoy the free minutes.

If you are in the US and cannot connect using one of our normal access numbers, please use 1 (323) 500-4026.

Our main access number provider is having an issue. The 1 (323) 500-4026 is on an alternate network and will work.

Apologies for the troubles. We are in contact with our primary access number provider and helping them to resolve the issue.

Hi,

IndiaLD has been getting pretty big lately, and it looks like we are going to continue growing at this rate for the next couple of months. While growth is great, one of the downsides is that you need to increase your capacity in many different ways. Some of you may have noticed that our access numbers had busy signals during peak times last week. This was because we were maxing out our inbound connections. Part of this problem was solved yesterday when we significantly increased capacity on our US lines.

We need your help to solve the other part. The next time you login to your account, please look for your new assigned access number here:

From now on, we would like you to use the access number that appears in your account when you use IndiaLD. To put it in techie terms that many of you will understand, we are doing some load distribution on our access numbers and would appreciate it if you made the switch. By spreading our traffic out over a whole bunch of access numbers in different locations, it will help us to keep growing and avoid the dreaded busy signals that happen at peak times.

Another benefit of doing this is that a certain “magical” VOIP service keeps illegally blocking our access numbers. Because we are tired of constantly changing our access numbers, we’ve decided to pull the US numbers off the front facing part of the site and assign them individually in the account area.

We are keeping our existing access numbers open, but are asking all of you to do your part and make the switch. It will take a lot of the burden off our big workhorse numbers and allow the system to function more efficiently.

Right now, 4% of all calls from the US to India run through IndiaLD. That’s hundreds of millions of minutes a year. Help us to keep the quality of those calls top notch by changing your access number today.

Thanks,

Chris

We are going to be offline for 2 hours on Monday February 7th starting at 1PM PST. This is a standard upgrade that will allow us to make better use of our call routing software, and should result in improvements in how we route calls internationally.

As always, we are sorry to take the service down. We have scheduled the downtime during our lightest calling period to minimize any inconvenience.

IndiaLD is cutting rates to call India from the US with the introduction of our new US to India plans:

500 minutes are just $4.45
1000 minutes are just $7.95
1500 minutes are $13.95
2000 minutes are $19.95
Unlimited minutes are just $29.95

These are some amazing rates that you won’t find anywhere else. All of our US to India plans are priced under a penny with 500 and 1000 minutes just $0.008 per minute. You can find all of our new plans here: http://www.indiald.com/countries/usa.

If you are an existing IndiaLD customer and only call from the US to India, then you can change your current plan to one of our new US plans by contacting customer service and asking to be moved. Please realize that these plans require that you only make calls through our US access number. You cannot share these plans with anyone living outside the USA. Because many of our customers in the US also have family and friends around the world using their plans, we are not automatically converting you to our new US plans.

We are very excited to be able to offer these extremely low rates and our new US to India unlimited plan to our customers. Because we do so much traffic out of the US, we have been able to significantly lower our costs in the US and pass the savings on to you.