Communications credits territory based availability

[Nicholas Plant]

The situation with communications credits is very confusing. Disappointingly, calling plans are still only available in a small number of countries and no new countries have entered preview since March. However, there is a much longer list of territories where calling credits are available listed here. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Countries-and-region-availability-for-Audio-Conferencing-an... However, it is not at all clear to me whether this means that I can now provision PSTN calling out for the staff in our Poland office but using calling credits rather than calling plans or whether PSTN calling out is still limited to the territories where calling plans are available. Does anybody have any insight - I have a Polish service number and we are receiving PSTN originated calls on that but I also need to provision PSTN calling out but do not want to move away from a pure SfB Online cloud play.

[#2]

Hi there Nicholas,

I can't speak to the roadmap for more countries getting "user phone numbers and phone service" previously called PSTN Calling, now called Calling Plans. As you say today it's only 9 countries.

"Communication credits" are used for 3 main use cases

 - PSTN Calling users over their plan minutes, once the plan is done they go to a per minute mode

 - Per minute PSTN conferencing users http://tomtalks.uk/2017/09/new-microsoft-skype-business-online-pstn-conferencing-pay-per-minute-opti...

 - free phone inbound conferencing calls (or free phone inbound to a service number for an Auto Attendant or Call Queue)

 - some outbound PSTN conferencing scenarios to "non included countries" in the "flat rate"/E5 plan

That's why consumption credits are available in more counties than "Calling Plans". As it covers all the above scenarios in non-calling plan countries.

There is no "pure per minute" PSTN Calling option, and you can't have PSTN Calling outside the 9 countries listed at present.

Hope that helps clarify, questions welcome

Tom

[#3]

Thanks Tom, that definitely makes it clear. Lets hope that there are some developments on the expansion of the territories where calling plans are available soon. What I find odd is that there haven't been any new territories entering preview. One can only hope that this is because there will be some sort of "big bang" roll out of calling plans (EU wide maybe) straight to GA because if there isn't then the rollout of SfB as a global telephone solution looks to have stalled. I am sure that is not the case but it would be most disappointing if it was.

[#4]

I have no insider knowledge, but based on countries each having Unique legal requirements, I wouldn't anticipate a "big bang" anything I'm afraid.

Would love to be proved wrong ;)

[#5]

You are probably correct that individual country telco licensing issues (and inter telco interconnect agreements) probably work against a "big bang" (apart from MAYBE in the EU) but that is what makes the lack of new territories entering preview so puzzling. Of course one way of getting a" big bang" would be for Microsoft to buy a Telco  with a reasonable international footprint. Certainly no news on new territories for PSTN calling for 9 months is a very strange and frankly disappointing situation.