Every carrier and reseller eventually asks the same question: which route actually gives the best return on the money spent — the cheap one, or the one that costs a fraction more but connects almost every time it's dialed? The honest answer is that the number on a rate sheet tells you almost nothing on its own. What matters is cost per completed call, and that figure depends on far more than the per-minute price.
Rate Sheets Lie If You Only Read the First Column
Picture two routes to the same country. Route A is priced at $0.004/min and answers 42% of attempts. Route B is priced at $0.007/min and answers 78% of attempts. On paper, A looks nearly half the price. In practice, A costs more per completed call, because you're paying for every failed attempt too — redials, agent time wasted on dead air, and customers who give up before the second try.
This is why we built our own termination pricing around two clearly separated tiers rather than a single blended number: CLI routes for traffic where the connection has to hold, and Non-CLI routes for high-volume outbound where price per attempt is the priority. Neither is universally "better" — they're built for different jobs.
The Three Numbers Worth Watching
Ignore the marketing copy and look at three figures whenever you're evaluating a route:
- ASR (Answer Seizure Ratio) — the share of dialed calls that actually get answered. Strong CLI routes to major destinations typically sit somewhere in the 60-80% band; anything routinely under 40% is a sign the route is congested, blocked, or simply low quality.
- ACD (Average Call Duration) — how long completed calls actually last. A route with decent ASR but very short ACD often means calls connect and then drop almost immediately, which is arguably worse than a clean failure.
- PDD (Post-Dial Delay) — the gap between dialing and the first ring. Past five or six seconds, most people hang up before anything even happens, so the call never gets a fair chance to connect.
Ask for these numbers broken out by destination, not as one network-wide average. A provider can have an excellent overall average while quietly underperforming on the three or four countries that make up most of your actual traffic.
Why the Same Rate Can Mean Two Different Routes
Two providers quoting an identical rate to the same country can deliver very different results, because the rate says nothing about the path the call takes to get there. A call handed directly to the destination carrier behaves differently than one that bounces through two or three resellers before it arrives — every extra hop is a place where quality can degrade and cost can quietly get added back in.
That's the reasoning behind keeping our own network built on direct and near-direct interconnects wherever we can, rather than reselling capacity we don't control. It's a big part of why our CLI rates hold up in practice, not just on the sheet.
Where Least-Cost Routing Fits In
If you're running enough volume to justify it, least-cost routing (LCR) is what lets you stop picking a single carrier per destination and instead let the system choose dynamically — routing based on live cost and quality rather than a static assignment made months ago. A well-tuned LCR setup does three things consistently: it watches ASR in real time rather than trusting a benchmark from last quarter, it fails over automatically the moment a route's quality slips, and it keeps re-checking pricing as carriers adjust their own rates.
Our own A-Z termination pricing refreshes daily for exactly this reason — a rate sheet that's a month old is already working against you.
Matching the Route to the Job
The practical takeaway is simpler than the metrics make it sound: customer-facing traffic where a callback might happen should run on CLI, full stop, regardless of the extra cost per minute. High-volume, lower-stakes outbound — think dialer campaigns — can usually tolerate Non-CLI pricing without hurting outcomes in any way that matters to the bottom line. Before shifting real volume to a new route, get destination-level ASR data rather than an average, confirm exactly how billing increments work, and run a short live test against your current provider before switching over completely.
The Short Version
The best route isn't the cheapest line on a sheet — it's the one with the lowest cost per call that actually connects. Match CLI or Non-CLI to what the traffic needs, ask for real per-destination data before committing, and treat pricing as something that should move with the market, not something you lock in once and forget about.