Comment by bkruse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkruse | Hacker News Reader

I work in the telecom space. I was previously over the carrier network at MagicJack and oversaw about 600 million minutes a month of telecom "traffic". I can say that the awareness is a step in the right direction, but these "solutions" are anything but a solution.

I don't think it's as simple as people think - for example, simply make sure the person owns the CallerID. At what point in the call stream would that be validated? You have to think that, when a call is made through a typical VoIP provider, it is most likely passed through 10 carriers (through arbitrage long-distance, then IXCs, then tandem/CLLI/POI CLLI).

I believe a good step would be to simply let the FTC trace using the CIC code that all carriers send over the PSTN/traditional telecom network. That way, the FTC could track a particular call or number through all the carriers until it reaches the originating information. The FTC has the capability to do that now, and based on the number of subpoena requests I've received (about 10/day), they actively do it.

The problem is that the companies doing the "illegal" robocalling (business to consumer/DNC or TSR violations) are overseas. There is no way, IMHO, that it can be stopped as long as long-distance providers exist.

Yeah, if these were real solutions, I'd pay a lot more than $3K to get the details on them. I've spent far more than that on the problem.

At one point we were doing around a billion calls a day by a customer that swore they had nothing to do with dialer. They mixed the traffic very skillfully, so they always kept their overall statistics just at the contractual limit.

Blocking repeated source numbers just means people start making up numbers. At that point, you can't really block things. You could perhaps get a score of the likelihood of a call being legit, and perhaps retroactively you could determine a bunch of calls had a high amount of dialer. But I don't think it's possible to find an algorithm that has a good-enough accuracy rate to do real-time blocking.

Of course, from a telecom perspective, I don't really care about the content of the call. I just want the avg duration to not be so low that other carriers get upset. To that end, simply making sure dialer customers don't hangup immediately seems to suffice.

Michael,

You are exactly right. All the traditional means (like blocking a callerID) is far past it's useful time. The dialer companies are getting smarter as well. It's BIG business for them, so it's worth the money to figure out solutions.

Also, it's very difficult to error on the side of caution - you do not want to block a normal phone call, or your upstream will stop sending you calls and you lose money.

Typically, a dialer customer will hangup once an answering machine is detected (usually around 2 seconds into the call) - causing lots of short duration calls. What the dialer customer's are doing now, is simply holding the call open for longer, to raise their overall ACD. It's a tough game. The moment telecom carriers start caring about what the call is (call types, information in the call, etc) - they become liable.

That's the thing I don't get - if a dialer customer doesn't immediately hangup on answering machines, and gets past the 6-second mark, "magically", everyone stops considering it dialer. Their rates then drop dramatically. That is, the dialer people are literally costing themselves more money by aggressively hanging up.

OTOH, it seems like a lot of people in telecom can't do simple math. For instance, the desire of customers wanting to buy flat rate for a very non-flat area. It's trivial to show that they'll never end up paying less on a flat rate, but they still insist.

If the stats are good, then why would any carrier care about the content? A lot of dialer is legal (like political dialer).

You got it! Political surveys as well as B2B. It makes no sense that it's magically non-dialer since 75% of the calls are now 12 seconds instead of 6 seconds :P

People don't understand that flat-rate in this day in age means "I will send you all of my calls that are above the flat-rate, to your flat-rate" - aka LCR'ing the flat-rate. The whole industry has changed so much in the last 4 years. I am excited to see if the $0.0007 flat intercarrier FTC ruling will ever go through.

You are right - if the stats are good, the carrier doesn't care. The stats are the ONLY thing the carrier can control, and should control, imo.

Why not just fine the provider that brought the call into the US? They would suddenly have a strong financial incentive to find a way to pass these fines onto the originator.

How does ATT know it's a robocall? Also, the FCC (not FTC) mandates that ATT or any tandem-interconnected company accept ALL CALLS that come into their network via a tandem

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