How Does FreeConferenceCall.com Make Money? (2012) | Hacker News Reader

How Does FreeConferenceCall.com Make Money? (2012)

aaronparecki.com

142 pointscoloneltcb44 comments

I can't believe this post is making the rounds again six years later. Reply All did a great podcast about a similar issue, it's worth a listen!

https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/104-case-phantom-calle...

Thanks for the link. Just listened, what a fantastic mystery to solve.

I remember that podcast episode, but that case was specifically about fraud and someone getting dialers to call people and play weird stuff to keep them on the line as long a possible. It's only a few cents here and there but it adds up if you automate the process.

IIRC, the situation was brought up at a telecom conference and the calls dropped suddenly; suggesting at least one of the people involved was deep into the industry and probably at the conference. They even get an FBI agent on at one time who is convinced they'll find this person.

Thanks for linking to this podcast, I've listened to like 6/7 episodes since I saw this comment.

A great example of rent-seeking. FreeConferenceCall isn't trying to provide a service to users, it's trying to extract money from the rest of the world through a legal clause that never anticipated this kind of exploitation.

While it's users are probably quite happy with the situation, the reality is that the service they're receiving is being paid for by totally unrelated parties.

>the government allows them to charge

Seems like an euphemism for "the government forces the others to pay".

Stockholm Syndrome

Relevant ToS clause for AT&T Wireless:

>5.4 Unlimited Voice Services

>Unlimited voice Services are provided primarily for reasonably uninterrupted live dialog between two individuals. If your use of unlimited voice Services for conference calling or call forwarding exceeds 750 minutes per month, AT&T may, at its option, terminate your Service or change your plan to one with no unlimited usage components.

Has anyone ever experienced getting cancelled for this reason? I know quite a few people that likely use more than 750 minutes on conference calls most months. And I have never heard of anyone having a problem.

Also, that's an annoying caveat to "unlimited". Unlimited, except ... limited.

Shouldve called it unlimited with a Fair Use Policy.

Unless law explicitly forbids, it's just a matter of time until marketing and sales will push to call all company's services "free and unlimited".

This has been bothering me about Verizon’s current marketing push around every individual on a family plan being able to get ‘the unlimited plan they need’. I haven’t been in the market for a ‘family unlimited plan’ and frankly understand little about mobile billing in general, so I have no idea what pain point Verizon is claiming to address with this model - but the concept on its face makes no sense to me. How can there be different ‘unlimited’ plans? On what dimensions do plans vary if not ‘limits’? If the plans are all unlimited, yet different, then why do you still identify them as ‘unlimited’ plans when that is clearly not a distinguishing characteristic?

> I have no idea what pain point Verizon is claiming to address

I recently shopped for an "unlimited" family plan for my kids. The pain point is "can I watch video?" As best I can determine, "unlimited" has become a marketing term for "yes, you can stream Netflix, to some degree."

There might be a cap on the number of GB of transfer, after which you pay a fee for more; or you can have no cap, but a limit after which your transfer rate drops precipitously. Several providers do a thing where they'll force Netflix (and I assume other streaming providers) to use a lower bitrate stream variant, to help you preserve you data.

There appears to no longer be an actual unlimited plan in the US. Even my grandfathered iPhone AT&T plan with "unlimited" data now has a cap after which it is rate-limited.

I'm kind of surprised the FTC or FCC hasn't made any more of a stink about the clearly deceitful use of 'unlimited' on these plans.

My grandfathered AT&T plan is still unlimited data, no cap, but they aggressively try to get me to change it frequently anymore, and recently started charging me some legacy maintainence fee. (I’ve had essentially the same plan since 2007).

Well, we have no government. If we did the word unlimited would not be used, because it's not true. Like the hosts "Unlimited traffic and space" for $1.99 a month. Yeah, let's put Yahoo's video files on it and let's see how unlimited it is.

A while back I stumbled upon an interesting issue with a hacked Asterisk server. It was routing calls to FreeConferenceCall.com and other free conference numbers.

https://www.mnxsolutions.com/security/i-accidentally-recorde...

Toll fraud is quite common due to the VOIP industry not valuing security. Combined with free conference calling numbers costing a bit to call (and calls to these numbers lasting a fair while), I'm not surprised that most of the traffic was headed to these numbers.

Any idea how this Asterisk server would have been added as a route?

These callers that were recorded, were not the ones trying to leverage the hacked server, but rather just dialed the number and were routed through it.

One common exploit if only one user account is hacked is to set up a forward to a specific high cost number that receives a lot of traffic. There are carriers who aggregate these routes and even blend them in with legitimate routes and then resell them to other carriers at a low cost.

> Everything from blocking calls to free conference numbers, to lawsuits, to adding to your terms of service that you're not allowed to call them.

Notably, Google Voice charges 1¢ per minute to call some of these services, even though US domestic calls are usually free.

Life finds a way.

This is my fav comment in the thread, FYI. Never mind the downvotes.

How freeconferencecall.com makes money reminds me alot of how car windshield companies make money. (E.g. safelite)

Insurance sometimes covers it, but a windshield company makes money through the insurance company many times, not necessarily through you. Sometimes you pay in the end for the higher insurance premiums down the road though, depending on your state and insurance package.

Instead of price per minute why doesn't the government tax the big carriers and subsidize the rural ones at a fixed monthly amount?

The original goal of this interstate call pricing scheme was to help encourage universal POTS service through America without creating something like the Universal Service Fund, primarily leaving it to "free" enterprise to provide universal coverage, mainly through small, rural telco cooperatives in areas Ma Bell wouldn't service.

Eventually the USF was created to help the least connected areas that didn't have tons of urbanites calling to fund their local telco cooperative. Meanwhile, these interstate calling rates were layered with intrastate calling rates as the baby bells prepared for local loop unbundling, expecting competing telephone companies to mainly target consumers.

Instead, what happened is CLECs mainly focused on business, creating those classic 1000 free hour discs from AOL, NetZero and the like. This pissed the Regional Bell Companies (which were the fragments of Bell Systems) off quite a bit, and they've been pushing forward with bill and keep as much as they can ever since.

Bill and Keep is essentially we bill eachother, and its hopefully close enough to a wash that no checks need to be cut. Doesn't work out that way though when dealing with even the most benign of businesses as your primary customer, plumbers, pharmacies, medical practices and the like mainly take inbound calls.

Are these termination fees still in effect?

In some rural areas there are still extremely high ratecenters that are costly to call. Looking at a ratedeck, 1240655 (Maryland), most Montana numbers and especially the Northwestern Territories (up in Canada) are the costliest to call, ranging from a few cents a minute to tens of cents a minute. Most flat rate VOIP operators won't deliver calls to those numbers, and if they do, they'll close your account if you call there too often.

The FCC has been cracking down on Traffic Pumping (which is what FreeConferenceCall, AOL, NetZero, etc were all created to do) to these prefixes, along with fake ringing that companies including T-Mobile do to make it seem like the call is being connected to these high cost areas, meanwhile the person your calling doesn't ever receive the call (or it gets through after attempting to call for multiple minutes).

> along with fake ringing that companies including T-Mobile do to make it seem like the call is being connected to these high cost areas, meanwhile the person your calling doesn't ever receive the call

Interestingly enough T-Mobile has started giving me a notice before calls to some of these providers saying that I'll be charged 1 cent a minute for the call.

T-Mobile claims they are only doing this on traffic pumped numbers that cost them significantly more than that to call, but from the little I've looked into it they're charging this fee on paid conference call numbers that cost $0.002/min to call in the ratedecks I've checked (after doing an LRN DIP of course).

I've reached out to T-Mobile's business team repeatedly on an account that I'm a POC on to get a full list of surcharged numbers, but they are unwilling to disclose this basic information. This kind of stuff is what keeps businesses on Sprint and Verizon, at least they know their NANPA calls will get delivered reliably without surprise surcharges!

Does the same apply to places like Bermuda, Guam and Trinidad which are in the North American +1 area?

I've wondered how that works. In other countries / continents, it's clear when I'm calling a foreign number as the prefix is different. It's also common that different costs are reflected in the local number, like British numbers beginning 07 being mobile phones; it costs more to call one from a basic landline.

Does calling Bermuda cost the same as calling New York?

Bermuda looks to be slightly under 4 cents per minute, Guam is 2 cents per minute, Trinidad is around 20 cents per minute. I've yet to see any provider include these area codes in their NANPA ratedecks, so presumably they won't route them as NANPA numbers (yet to test that though). I know for wireless carriers, callback fraud where a Trinidad number will call you briefly to make it look like you missed a call and thus call back is quite popular. I'd assume the fraudsters are getting a revenue cut on inbound calls...

Clever, but it still sounds like it wouldn't add up to that much. They only make a small amount when it connects to a user connected through a small phone company right? Based on this description connecting someone on AT&T in NYC to Verizon in LA wouldn't result in any revenue.

I guess the conference call company is located behind a small rural carrier? Then they can charge the incoming AT&T and Verizon callers 8c each.

You would think if this was costing the big carriers too much, they could just offer their own free conference call number.

They could even spam users with a text message about their own service after someone makes an expensive call to one of the free conference call numbers.

You put the conferencing gear in rural telco colos where the termination fee is high.

It’s a public policy (universal service fund) arbitrage play.

Is it just an Asterisk server with some T1 cards?

Is this not viable anymore?

It sounds like they get ~$0.04/min for every user. I bet that adds up!

Back of the envelope calculation:

Avg of 30 min conference calls x say 1 million users per month = $1.2 million a month, or $14.4 million a year

These sort of rates were real in the past, but regulatory changes have decreased them dramatically. In general, much less than $0.01/mi at wholesale rates.

I worked for a now defunct company that was making $7mm/year doing this. With only 4 people on payroll.

Out of curiosity, why did it go defunct?

I am not sure if this is related but I also worked for a company that had this business model and they were desperately trying to change their business model because the money that came in from these calls was decreasing and would eventually stop coming in. It could be that they stop making enough more.

It could also be that they were bought by a different company that had this business model (something that my old company did all the time.)

I don't know all the details, but supposedly the telecom we were partnered with got in trouble with the FCC? and ended things.

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