What does "Virtually Unlimited" Mean?

It's difficult to offer a truly unlimited calling product. As soon as you do, call centers take you up on it and talk sixteen hours a day on two shifts. In an industry where costs are incurred for each minute used, a truly unlimited product is a losing endeavor.

Many of our competitors have chosen to get around this problem by offering an "unlimited product", and then stipulating in the contracts and licensing agreements that the product can not be used by "call centers", "businesses whose primary activity is conducted via the telephone", or some other wordy and ambiguous designation. Some even change the meaning of the word "unlimited", imposing a cap with stiff per-minute penalties for overages or even account cancellation.

At Jive Communications, we've taken a different route. Each phone on your system adds 1500 free pooled outbound minutes to your account (with inbound calls to your 'local' numbers completely unlimited/unmetered). Once those minutes are used, each minute is billed at $0.02. Since 95% of our customers use less than 700 minutes per phone per month, most clients enjoy paying a flat rate each month for their feature-rich telephone service (the other 5% of our customers are call-centers).

The "Virtually Unlimited" distinction is used for one reason: the vast majority of our clients dramatically over-estimate the amount of time they spend on the phones. They don't necessarily want "unlimited" calling; rather, they want to know that they'll be paying a flat amount each month for telephone service. We've placed the number of free minutes at 1500 so that most clients are comfortably below the per-minute billing range.