We consider the electron-positron annihilation process into hadrons R e + e − up to O(α 3 s ) and we adopt the smearing method suggest by Poggio, Quinn and Weinberg to confront the experimental data with theory. As a theoretical model we use a QCD coupling constant frozen in the low energy regime, where this coupling can be parameterised in terms of an effective dynamical gluon mass (mg) which is determined through Schwinger-Dyson equations. In order to find the best fit between experimental data and theory we perform a χ 2 study, that, within the uncertainties of the approach, has a minimum value when mg/ΛQCD is in the range 1.2 − 1.4. These values are in agreement with other phenomenological determinations of this ratio and lead to an infrared effective charge αs(0) ≈ 0.7. We comment how this effective charge may affect the global duality mass scale that indicates the frontier between perturbative and non-perturbative physics.