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They do not make money from it. Actually, robocalls are really looked down upon in the industry, as the traffic is not profitable. Imagine this - telco carriers
by bkruse 10y ago
They do not make money from it. Actually, robocalls are really looked down upon in the industry, as the traffic is not profitable. Imagine this - telco carriers are charging per minute. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no per-call fees, only per minute with 6 second minimums and 6 second increments. Now imagine all the robocalls where they keep calls open for 3 seconds ( enough to determine if it's a live human or answering machine ). That carrier has a lot of resource utilization to "setup" a call, but after that, there is not much that the carrier needs to do.
In order to combat this, all tier-1 carriers now have ASR (answer ratio) and ACD (average call duration) minimums. In addition, if you have more than ~10% of your calls less than 6 seconds, you get an ADDITIONAL 1-2 cent per call surcharge. That's a lot of money given that my average cost of long distance is .17 cents ($0.0017) per minute.
It's the second tier carriers that is "blending" this traffic with good traffic in order to get the minimums then charge the telemarketers much higher costs per minute.
- walrus01 10y agoRelated to this there is now a whole subset of shady/gray market VoIP, SIP trunking providers who specialize in "dialer" traffic and calls which have low ACD. They specifically market to outbound call centers and automated dialer traffic and have their own special rate tiers for such traffic. Conversely there are a number of large, more ethical SIP providers who will cut you off if your outbound traffic consistently falls into the same pattern with low ACD. "No dialer traffic" is turning up in Terms of Service agreements with greater frequency.
- MichaelGG 10y agoYep and it's a huge business for them. (I work in this industry, with these kinds of companies.) It results in great deals for non-robo callers, as they are desperate to get good conversational traffic to add to the mix. It depends on which provider, but the dialer penalties usually aren't that harsh. Regardless, everyone's cautious. And they'll mix right to the limit. Put on restrictions on how many times a number can call? They'll switch up numbers and keep the mix perfect. It creates a huge opportunity. If the FCC was serious, they'd just start cracking down and push liability on down the line. Then no one would want to take the risk. It's high volume, so without huge deposits and guarantees, no one would touch it.