Changes to international calling, and abuse protection

This post is to announce upcoming changes to the structure of our pricing for international outbound calls.

The following changes will come into affect no earlier than 1 August 2024.

How do international calls work today?

By default international calls are enabled for all customers. When you use VXT to make an international call, the carrier that manages the phone number you are calling charges a fee to receive your call that generally varies by number type e.g. mobile, geographic (landline), and premium rate.

For simplicity we have charged all customers a flat fee of $0.20 NZD per minute, regardless of the destination (country and number type). Generally, international calls on the VXT network have been to a small range of destinations for which our pricing structure is suitable. However, VXT is growing very fast internationally and that means the we are continually required to support a wider range of international calling destinations, including ones with dramatically higher fees.

What is changing?

Introducing pricing tiers for international calls

We are introducing a tiered system for pricing international calls depending on the destination so that we can continue to support a wide range of destinations.

• Tier 1, Low cost destinations
  • $0.25 NZD per minute
  • 47% of all possible destinations
  • 58% of calls

• Tier 2, Medium
  • $0.75 NZD p/m
  • 36% of destinations
  • 26% of calls

• Tier 3, High
  • $2.00 NZD p/m
  • 16% of destinations
  • 14% of calls

• Tier 4, Very high
  • $4.00 NZD p/m
  • 1% of destinations
  • 2% of calls

Alongside the introduction of these tiers we will be adding more in-app information including allowing admins to audit all external communications using the Records tab, and allowing admins to enable and disable calling certain tiers.

Our policy is to not provide a list of all destinations and their associated tiers, because there are more than 200,000 possible destinations for international calls. Destinations include country; such as Germany, and Zimbabwe, number types; such as mobile, geographic, and premium rate, service providers; such as O2, Vodafone, AT&T, and area codes.

Blocking high risk destinations

We already block calls to premium rate numbers due to their association with toll-fraud and other types of crime and abuse. As a part of these changes we will expand our blocked destinations to include additional high risk destinations. Blocked destinations include approximately 1% of all possible destinations. If you call a blocked destination in VXT, we will automatically play a prerecorded message to inform you that the destination you attempted to call is considered high risk and blocked.