Every January we go out to the PTC show in Honolulu to meet with carriers. Many of the show meetings take place on couches in the outdoor hotel lobby. Hometown always goes down at the crack of dawn to get the best couches, and we always hold one for Chris and his team. To think that he will not be by our side this year, or in the years to come.

The industry has lost a larger than life figure, our founder has lost a good friend, and his family has lost a loving husband and devoted father. He will be missed.

Thank you for everything Chris.

The extra $1.00 has been added directly to your balance. It only is for people who are in Quarter Calls and made a call from November 10th to today regardless of whether your call went over 30 minutes or not.

You will not see any history of this in your billing summary so please do not look for it there. Take my word for it, if you were affected, your balance has been credited with the equivalent of 4 Quarter Calls.

As you may be aware, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued a new regulation on the SMS industry in India in the latter part of last year. After multiple delays and updates, these regulations are now scheduled to go into effect on September 27, 2011. These regulations are designed to significantly curb the sending of unsolicited commercial communications to consumers through enhanced enforcement of the National Do Not Call (NDNC) list, now renamed the National Customer Preference Registry (NCPR).

While our customers use SMS for personal communication, our service is classified in India as a commercial service and subject to these requirements. We are exploring alternate methods of delivering SMS, such as including your US number as the sender, so that we are no longer considered commercial. We will resume SMS service once we have found a solution.

IndiaLD USA 500 from $4.45 to $4.95
IndiaLD USA 1000 from $7.95 to $9.95
IndiaLD USA 1500 from $13.95 to $14.95
IndiaLD USA 2000 from $19.95 to $19.95

All of our USA to India calling plans are being priced at a cost of 1 cent per minute.

All plans that renew on or after September 7th will be charged at the new rates.

We have had to raise prices on some of our plans in order to offset our increased cost of doing business. We have held off on doing so for as long as possible, but now need to reprice our plans in order to continue providing the same high level of service that we have always offered.

We will also be making several additional changes to our service in the near future. We will be eliminating the credit limit/overage facility, and raising the minimum number of Top Up minutes you can purchase. Both of those are necessary moves because of increases in our merchant processing costs.

IndiaLD will also be offering some additional features that many of you have asked for. Look for soft phone support, and the ability to buy blocks of minutes with a 90 day expiration soon.

After 8/26/2011, all USA Unlimited customers will be converted into the IndiaLD 3000 Minute Plan which costs $39.90 per month.

So for example, if your plan renews on 8/20/11, you will get 6000 unlimited minutes added to your account for $29.95. Then on 9/20/11, you will get 3000 minutes added for $39.90.

If you do not want to be switched into the IndiaLD 3000 minute plan, please contact customer service and tell them which plan you want to be moved into. You may also cancel your account if our other plans do not meet your calling needs.

The USA Unlimited was an interesting experiment for us, but one that is ultimately not working. The average minutes per user in the unlimited plan was just too high for us to keep it open. With the market changing, we have chosen to simplify our product offerings and bow out of the unlimited game.

If you would like to help, you can do so by letting us send a small amount of mobile credit to someone you know in India at our expense. The amount will probably be somewhere between 50 and 250 INR. To participate in this test, all someone needs to do is comment on this post with the following information:

• Indian mobile number
• Name of the mobile network that number is on (i.e. Voda, Tata, Idea, etc…)
• An email address for the person at this number (we will need them to email us back with the confirmation message)

All comments will be kept hidden to keep personal information confidential.

We will be making 10 to 20 test messages and are trying to get a wide mix of Indian mobile operators. People will get the credit on a first come, first serve basis based on what mobile network they have.

This is not limited to IndiaLD customers. You can submit a friend’s information for the credit, or just tell someone in India to comment themselves.

Thanks

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.

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

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.

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