FCC's Robocaller Crackdown Brings Stark Warning for Voice Providers (cnet.com) 47
The US Federal Communications Commission is continuing its battle against illegal robocalls. In its latest move, the agency on Wednesday issued cease-and-desist warnings to two more companies. From a report: The warning letters indicate that voice service providers SIPphony and Vultik must "end their apparent support of illegal robocall traffic or face serious consequences," according to an FCC announcement. The FCC says its investigations show that Vultik and SIPphony have allowed illegal robocalls to originate from their networks. Each provider must take immediate action and inform the FCC of the active steps it's taking to mitigate illegal robocalls. If either fails to comply with steps and rules outlined in the letters, its call traffic may be permanently blocked.
Storage (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Late to the party? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Late to the party? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Late to the party? (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably a real similar problem with banks. The only reason it's possible to steal money by wire transferring through multiple banks is if a bank in the chain refuses to disclose where the money went next or who has it now.
So you have to only permit banks willing to cooperate swiftly to be allowed to receive or send wires at all.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> So you have to only permit banks willing to cooperate swiftly to be allowed to receive or send wires at all.
I see what you did there. ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Late to the party? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think because of the idea of common carrier, ie, all calls must be carried so that a phone company does not get to decide which calls get forwarded. Imagine the baby bell consortium to decide we will only carry bell calls, all others are suspect. Disaster. The above comment is letting google decide. Do I really want google to decide who is a good call? Do I really trust google that much. The current framework seems to be slowly working, albeit slowly. Basically making creditable carriers know their customer, kind of like banks are required.
That's not an issue in other countries.
You don't punish the carrier who transferred the call, you punish the carrier on which the call originated. They're entering the network domestically because it's too expensive to call from an international source.
Re: (Score:2)
Because the simple shortcut would be heavily restricting calls using US numbers from overseas call centers. But there's a lot of big companies also using those for customer support.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Spoofing still has totally normal and required uses. Like having more than one carrier but using the same phone number for outbound calls on all of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not. I use it daily just to have multiple VoIP providers for failover.
Re: (Score:2)
That is a convenience, not a necessity.
I am simply not going to pay for a landline, when literally 99.9% of the incoming calls are worthless garbage. Having a means to identify and filter those calls is a practical necessity. If the local telco cannot cater to this necessity, they do not get my business.
Re:Late to the party? (Score:4, Informative)
Short answer -- lobbyists.
Long answer -- all the phone companies that interconnect with the phone network get interconnection fees for any incoming call off their network. The theory goes, every call you get, your provider gets a nickel. Spammers sending millions of calls to your provider gets them some big money. It was pretty common to hear AT&T list IXC fees as on of their top-ten revenue sources in their shareholder reports. The lobbyists were working hard to gum up the enforcement of any reasonable measures to eliminate spam calls. Heck, the original thing the lobbyists put out called SHAKEN/STIR really was fixing the wrong problem -- but it kicked the can down the road a few years -- and they've reaped millions of dollars because of it.
A Warning? (Score:1)
Whatever happened to good old lynchings?
Re: (Score:3)
Since a lot of these jackasses are probably foreign based, they might be beyond the reach of conventional American justice.
But " serious consequences " could very well entail bombardment from orbit. Lord knows we spend enough on the military black budget, use some of it for the betterment of society please.
Swamp drained? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting that soon after Ajit Pai leaves the FCC, they start finally issuing cease and desist letters.
I have no idea who the new guy is, but I think it was Jesus who said, "You will know me by my works."
Re: (Score:1)
I've seen a significant dip in past months already. But for voice spam - there seems to have been an uptick in SMS spam. If newguy could fire some shots across the bow there it'd be nice, get a little of the intimidation in my first sentence.
My gut reaction would be that it's harder to patrol and enforce but then again are the channels all that different than voice? In any case voice was the bigger problem. The damage is done, good luck if you're an auto shop or nurse or whatever in need of a time-sensitive
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that's because the 10DLC rollout is a huge mess. This is supposed to reduce spam by requiring registration of any phone number that is business-to-person. Carriers are using it as a money-grabbing scheme and you essentially have to pay every carrier that delivers SMS for your company. Not only one-time fees and monthly fees but also per-message. Because of this, adoption has been a mess so they can't really block or de-prioritize anyone not following the new rules without breaking all messaging.
Stop warning and start blocking FFS. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
"May" be blocked (Score:2)
This in practice means that it never will. There will be "warnings", "serious conversations" and "negotiating way forward" but no one ever will be blocked because if it took the gov't so much time to just get to 2 providers, it would take them decades to actually punish someone as an example.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Not necessarily on the fines and enforcement action..
These scam calls are a scourge to telco providers too. Up until recently the rules were in place where any facilities based provider had to terminate calls from anywhere .. similar to the common carrier status Youtube has .. they're the plumbing, not the provider.
Such that, a telco couldn't unilaterally block calls from an incoming provider. What the FCC is saying is that they will "allow" telcos to un-federate their SIP peering hosts from these rougue
Re: (Score:2)
That's a very libertarian way of thinking of it.
Oh those poor telcos, forced to develop and implement standards that reduce a noteworthy public nuisance.
OK, by that logic the telcos should pay their customers costs for allowing fraudulent and unsolicited calls through without taking steps to abate them.
So .. get a call advising your car's warrenty has expired? .. bill the phone company.
Interconnectiion (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked in telco for decades .. the SIP origin of these bad actors has been known for years and jumps straight out at you on a plot of traffic.
That is to say, millions of calls coming out but none going back.
The simplest answer here is (with the FCC final blessing) to remove the peering connections between SIP suplicants. Bad actors would be out of business overnight (unless they find somewhere else to inject their calls).
The technical solution (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What you are looking for is Shaken/Stirred, which is the carrier grade authentication mechanism that was designed to prevent that.
The problem is, there are technical use cases that don't allow for its use.
That is to say, calls from outside the US, calls from small telcos, calls from PBX systems that are setup to present the name and number of the person calling out.
That is to say, the solution is sized towards a telephone company operation, not your local hospital with a few hundred lines.
I'd honestly rathe
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
See DID (Direct Inward Dial).
Phone systems have always been about capacity management, see Erlang capacity calculations. There is not a 1-to-1 mapping of lines to phones, at some point more than 1 phone uses the same line that another had previously used and yet another will use in the future. Of course VoIP changes the traditional layout, and even changes the paradigm from circuit-switch to packet-switched. In a circuit switched world you almost never plan for everyone to use the phone at the same time -
Re: (Score:2)
Those Erlang numbers/formula are basically worthless unless you are trying to project things like how many agents to staff in a call center.
With VOIP you've functionally have unlimited bearers available. In the past there was an oversubscription ratio they used to use .. the one that became a problem in the mid 90s when people were camping on their phone line for hours to access the internet, but anymore its just not an issue.
DID (and the infrastructure to support it) used to act as a defacto limiter on sp
I mostly gave up on line lines long ago (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have the ringer off and only my answering machine answers my land line. I really only keep the land line for 911.
Rather than turn off the ringer I installed a Polycom OBI212, reprogrammed to demand the caller press "1" before it will ring through.
It might stop if... (Score:2)
All phone providers, land line, cellular, and VOIP, had to provide spam blocking for free to all customers and none of this upcharging crap like they do now. They created the problem in the first place and make money on it on both sides.
Meanwhile... (Score:1)
After a lull, a surge of fresh spam calls today almost as if in retaliation.
Re-post (Score:2)
Unwanted calls in 2023 is simply harassment.
Too Late, PSTN Voice is Dead (Score:2)
Robocalls killed Voice as an application and a business. Over-the-top voice applications are a viable replacement for telco voice under most circumstances. A working solution for robocalls for most mobile phone subscribers would be to stop including voice as a phone feature. No more robocalls, we just use our alternatives.
What a strategic misstep for an industry to use PSTN's network effect against itself and its users. And what a sad, cynical state the FCC has been in with Ajit Pai having worked against th