[VoiceOps] Rural call completion hotline

[Jason Baugher]

I'm not going to deny that traffic pumping hasn't happened, because I know
it has.

I'm also familiar with many rural telcos that aren't traffic pumping, and
are actually just trying to provide quality service. Inbound traffic from
the big guys gets least-cost routed to the dirt-cheap carrier of the day,
where it results in dropped calls, one-way audio, delayed ring, poor audio
quality, etc... The rural telco's customers call to ask why Cousin Jim who
is a Verizon customer can't call them, and they have to say, "Have Cousin
Jim open a trouble with Verizon."

Sometimes the rural telco manages to convince the big guys to change their
routing to avoid the dirt-cheap carrier, and then things work fine for
awhile until they change the routing back again.

The $5 million it cost Verizon is a drop in the bucket compared to what
they save by their shenanigans.

On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 11:42 PM, Jay Hennigan <jay at west.net> wrote:

> On 5/4/15 1:29 PM, David Thompson wrote:
>
>> Finally someone's taking a stand about this. Unacceptable in 2015 in
>> America that you cannot call coast to coast and expect the call to be
>> connected.
>>
>
> Yes and no.
>
> Imagine a rural town with a population of 600 people and maybe 300
> telephones that has very high per-minute termination charges justified by
> the cost of outside plant to reach those people. Building capacity to
> handle calls to those human beings living in that area and absorbing the
> charges of the miniscule percentage of total LD calls to those humans is
> trivial for most IXCs.
>
> When that rural town splits revenue with the operators of thousands of
> "free" conference call services, 900-number style chat lines,
> dial-a-prayer, and any other traffic pumping scheme you can think of,
> things change. The call failures to the live breathing humans actually
> living in the rural area aren't due to insufficient capacity to reach the
> subscribers that justified the high termination charges, they're due to
> orders of magnitude more inbound calls to the exchange than actual
> bona-fide rural lines.
>
> --
> Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay at impulse.net
> Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
> Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
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