8 ms·
What's keeping major carriers from getting serious about these steps already?
by majos 8y ago
What's keeping major carriers from getting serious about these steps already?
- imron 8y agoThey indirectly make money from the fraud, so incentives are not aligned for them to stop it.
- supertrope 8y agoAnd there are insufficient dis-incentives. There are no competitors who offer a superior spam filtering solution and market it. If carriers became financially liable for robocalls by a government mandated date, e.g. 2020, they would find a solution. Even if was as simple as not getting paid to carry spam traffic (as opposed to an EU level % of global revenue fine).
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y agoAnother trivial solution would be to offer some sort of voice CAPTCHA for phones - get asked question and provide answer in order to connect. Someone on here posted awhile back that they implemented their own and said it completely eliminated robocalls.
- walrus01 8y agoI have done this. I have my own VoIP system. One of my DIDs picks up and is a recording of me saying "I'm screening my calls for telemarketers and scams. enter code 5300 any time to be connected to $myname". If 5300 is entered, it dials out to the DID for my cellphone and transfers the call. No code, or no action, call goes nowhere. You can fairly easily make the code whatever you want or make it a multi step process.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y agoIf I remember correctly from the conversation I mentioned above: this is only implementable yourself with a VOIP solution and not an actual phone line?
- tremon 8y agoAs long as you have a programmable PBX with POTS support (e.g. Asterisk with a telephony expansion card [1]), you can do this with landlines too. [1] https://www.asterisk.org/products/telephony-interface-cards https://www.asterisk.org/products/telephony-interface-cards
- walrus01 8y agoI really recommend against introducing analog anything into a modern VoIP system in 2018. Better to port your landline's DID to a VoIP service and route it from there. If you need a physical landline looking phone, good quality sip desk phones are $50 (assuming you don't care about huge color screens).
- supertrope 8y agoDefinitely. End-to-end digital is best for fidelity and reliability. Running your own PBX is another point of failure for a service most people expect very high uptime out of, and opens you up to toll fraud. It's only worth it if you have a lot of phone or want call recording or transferring.
- swandog46 8y agoDid you find a way to do this that didn't require paying per-minute to (e.g.) Twilio for the call forwarding back to your cell phone?
- walrus01 8y agoI do pay per minute in 6 second increments but the price is so small to be barely noticeable.
- swandog46 8y agoReally? You end up having to pay per minute for the entire duration of every forwarded (non-spam) inbound phone call...
- walrus01 8y agoYes, costs average less than $6 a month. Wholesale SIP termination and origination is remarkably cheap if you are dealing with the US48 states and Canada. I believe I'm at something like 6/10ths of 1 cent per minute.
- swandog46 8y agoYes, that's about right. It's just a matter of whether you're willing to pay $6/month for this. :)
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago$6 a month is more than a fair price for me to eliminate robocalls; I receive about 5-10 on average in any given day. The collateral damage are systems that have you mark your place in line and call you back. It seems like these could be manually whitelisted though with some ingenuity.
- supertrope 8y agoDTMF based challenge is probably easier. Even requiring callers to dial 1 to ring through is enough to keep robocall campaigns from ringing your physical phone. I've been thinking about issuing my friends and family priority access PINs. If they save it to their contact entry for me after the number, I can entirely gate access. e.g. "5558675309,9876" Especially if combined with a time condition e.g. 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.
- jonathanmayer 8y agoMy experience was that the major carriers had little economic incentive to invest in improving telephone service, which they viewed as a legacy line of business. They were focused on selling data plans, building their networks, and entering new markets (especially online services and advertising).
- lotyrin 8y agoIf they truly aren't interested in it, that'd be great, they could just stop, open up to become dumb data pipes and create a market of competitive third-party service for the telephony part.
- cma 8y agoSpam calls are actually a cash cow. Uses your minutes and Verizon also makes money selling a subscription spam blocking service that would be worthless without the annoying calls: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/30/15906800/verizon-anti-spam-robocall-call-blocking-att-t-mobile https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/30/15906800/verizon-anti-spa...
- jjeaff 8y agoWhat percentage of US cell plans aren't unlimited minutes these days? I'm thinking it has to be a tiny amount. Seems like they would like to unclog their Network not to mention their servers have to handle and store all the voicemails.
- supertrope 8y agoIn the past, cellular network operators earned revenue based off minutes sold. That's why voicemail has very verbose instructions that are read to you every single time. It's a way of inflating average call duration and thus revenue. These days with unmetered calling, the receiving telco still makes some money off incoming calls through termination charges.
- Scoundreller 8y agoThe receiving provider usually gets paid to terminate the call. It may only be a fraction of a cent per minute, but these are the same telecoms that will gladly send you a bill every month because you owe them 1 cent.
- DINKDINK 8y agoSS7 is so broken that there's little telco could do even if they put effort into it.
- walrus01 8y agoFixing ss7 at this point would be like polishing the brass doorknobs on the Titanic.
- eftychis 8y agoThis is a good analogy unfortunately. SMS is the worst culprit there from my standpoint, given companies use it to send short term credentials (yes they do...) or for 2fa.
- utefan001 8y agoI either disagree or am ignorant about SS7. See my other post on this page. Interested to read others thoughts about implementing a "opt-in, call back only or GTFO system".
- walrus01 8y agoIf I have full control of a DID, implementing callback isn't hard. That would be a bandaid type solution built on top of the existing phone network, however. Fixing ss7 at a systemic level so that all call routing in and outbound is verifiable, CID spoofing is impossible, is what is nigh impossible.
- supertrope 8y agoAre there any proposed replacements? Even SIP has vulnerabilities, foot gun features, and fundamental design problems like use of MD5 digest, NAT intolerance, and vendor and device specific bugs.