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It’s not really been bought off by those exact carriers, but by the telco industry as a whole. The industry is honestly shady as fuck. They’re being pushed int

It’s not really been bought off by those exact carriers, but by the telco industry as a whole. The industry is honestly shady as fuck. They’re being pushed into irrelevance by the internet and VoIP (where there’s no such thing as paying for minutes, thankfully), have thousands of employees to pay (despite not doing much, as they became irrelevant over time), and so while incoming call revenue is maybe 1% of total revenue for someone like T-Mobile, it’s still paying for some useless people’s pay checks, so of course those are gonna fight back. Now aggregate that across the entire industry - everyone fighting for their 1% of total revenue - and you’ve still got a strong pushback. Finally your carrier knows they’re not going to loose your 100$/month over robocalls because you have nowhere to go. The situation might change if one carrier bites the bullet and implements a working solution (but good luck given that it requires industry-wide cooperation), then the other carriers will wake up as they now know customers actually have a competitor to go to.

rayiner 8y ago
T-Mo has two larger and one smaller national competitors. Do they want the $0.50 they get from robo callers more than the $70 they get from luring a user away from Verizon or AT&T?
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Even if they wanted the 70$, at the moment there’s nothing they can do about robocalls without cooperation from the entire industry. A robocall doesn’t look any more shady than a normal call from a receiving carrier’s perspective; whatever solution they come up with will have tons of false positives.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > A robocall doesn’t look any more shady than a normal call from a receiving carrier’s perspective; whatever solution they come up with will have tons of false positives. Doesn't that undermine a major premise of the OP's post? That one should assume corruption, because it's technically easy to filter robo calls and carriers don't do it only because they love the sweet, sweet, robo call inter-exchange fees? It sounds like filtering robo calls would require cooperation not only among telcos, but also with the VoIP providers that originate these calls.
  - pandaman 8y ago
    While you cannot say for certain that a particular call is coming from a robot, being a major network you can make a very good guess. E.g. when the same origin hits every number with a caller ID in that number's exchange just block that origin from your network. If there is a legitimate reason for this - they will contact you immediately and sort it out. Bonus point - spammers will hit the competitors networks with more bandwidth and force even more people to consider switching. The current situation is the one, which requires cooperation of the whole industry, actually. It's a prisoner's dilemma in the sense that the first one to implement anti-spam will gain a temporary advantage but eventually everyone will have to implement it and keep up with the spammers who will be finding new ways to circumvent these measures. As it stands now - nobody gains advantage and nobody has to spend money on anti-spam and lose revenue from spam at the same time. As little as it is, taking your $70 and $0.05 from spammers is a lot better than taking your $70 and zero from spammers.
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      > when the same origin hits every number There is no real concept of "origin". Unless you're the direct upstream carrier of the originator of the robocalls, the robocalls will be diluted with legitimate calls in such a way no single inbound carrier stands out.
      - pandaman 8y ago
        I see, are there second layer provides agregating multiple VoIP retailers? I thought VoIP route directly to the big telcos networks. But even in this case - just drop the whole 2nd layer provider and they will quickly deal with their spammer clients.
        Rjevski 8y ago
        Big carriers* often route directly, but even then, it's not guaranteed (they could use a third-party or even a competitor as a fallback in case their own interconnect goes down), and to be fair, big carriers (Twilio, etc) are decent at fighting abuse - it's not them we need to worry about. Small & shady carriers are where the problem is, and those often just resell capacity from bigger carriers (some of which in turn resell even bigger carriers), or sometimes even resell illegal "black" or "grey" routes as they're called, could even be compromised servers from legitimate customers of big carriers. In the end this entanglement mixes legitimate calls with malicious ones by the time they reach the destination (final) carrier, making it impossible for them to drop malicious calls without impacting a lot of legitimate usage. *I avoid saying VoIP retailers because it doesn't really mean anything; carriers often allow you to use different interconnects, and VoIP is just one of many.

rayiner 8y ago

T-Mo has two larger and one smaller national competitors. Do they want the $0.50 they get from robo callers more than the $70 they get from luring a user away from Verizon or AT&T?

Rjevski 8y ago
Even if they wanted the 70$, at the moment there’s nothing they can do about robocalls without cooperation from the entire industry. A robocall doesn’t look any more shady than a normal call from a receiving carrier’s perspective; whatever solution they come up with will have tons of false positives.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > A robocall doesn’t look any more shady than a normal call from a receiving carrier’s perspective; whatever solution they come up with will have tons of false positives. Doesn't that undermine a major premise of the OP's post? That one should assume corruption, because it's technically easy to filter robo calls and carriers don't do it only because they love the sweet, sweet, robo call inter-exchange fees? It sounds like filtering robo calls would require cooperation not only among telcos, but also with the VoIP providers that originate these calls.
- pandaman 8y ago
  While you cannot say for certain that a particular call is coming from a robot, being a major network you can make a very good guess. E.g. when the same origin hits every number with a caller ID in that number's exchange just block that origin from your network. If there is a legitimate reason for this - they will contact you immediately and sort it out. Bonus point - spammers will hit the competitors networks with more bandwidth and force even more people to consider switching. The current situation is the one, which requires cooperation of the whole industry, actually. It's a prisoner's dilemma in the sense that the first one to implement anti-spam will gain a temporary advantage but eventually everyone will have to implement it and keep up with the spammers who will be finding new ways to circumvent these measures. As it stands now - nobody gains advantage and nobody has to spend money on anti-spam and lose revenue from spam at the same time. As little as it is, taking your $70 and $0.05 from spammers is a lot better than taking your $70 and zero from spammers.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    > when the same origin hits every number There is no real concept of "origin". Unless you're the direct upstream carrier of the originator of the robocalls, the robocalls will be diluted with legitimate calls in such a way no single inbound carrier stands out.
    - pandaman 8y ago
      I see, are there second layer provides agregating multiple VoIP retailers? I thought VoIP route directly to the big telcos networks. But even in this case - just drop the whole 2nd layer provider and they will quickly deal with their spammer clients.
      - Rjevski 8y ago
        Big carriers* often route directly, but even then, it's not guaranteed (they could use a third-party or even a competitor as a fallback in case their own interconnect goes down), and to be fair, big carriers (Twilio, etc) are decent at fighting abuse - it's not them we need to worry about. Small & shady carriers are where the problem is, and those often just resell capacity from bigger carriers (some of which in turn resell even bigger carriers), or sometimes even resell illegal "black" or "grey" routes as they're called, could even be compromised servers from legitimate customers of big carriers. In the end this entanglement mixes legitimate calls with malicious ones by the time they reach the destination (final) carrier, making it impossible for them to drop malicious calls without impacting a lot of legitimate usage. *I avoid saying VoIP retailers because it doesn't really mean anything; carriers often allow you to use different interconnects, and VoIP is just one of many.