April 2020 - VoiceOps - lists.voiceops.org

ANIs flagged as telemarketer/spammer/scammer
by abalashov＠evaristesys.com Nov. 14, 2021

Nov. 14, 2021

Hi, So, of course, it is a known problem in the legitimate side of the lead engagement call centre, survey, etc. business that ANIs get flagged as "telemarketer" pretty quickly and start showing up that way on people's phones. Your normative viewpoint on that may vary depending on what you think of lead gen calls, but regardless, a reasonable person would differentiate between: (1) Legitimate outbound dialing operations that are following up with leads who provided their phone number and agreed to be called (at least, as a matter of clicking "accept" on _something_), or for some other legitimate mass-dialing purpose, and who actually own the DID inventory from which they present local-market ANIs and can in fact be reached on those numbers; (2) Illegal spammers who use fake ANIs and call people who did not in any way consent to being called by them. I am trying to learn a bit more about how this is done and what a legitimate, above-board business can do about it. Ignoring the factor of third-party call-screening apps (which most people with a mobile don't use), where is this generally implemented? As I understand it, T-Mobile do it on the network level. I have T-Mobile myself, and probably 2/3rds of unfamiliar numbers, including quite legitimate ones, show up as "Scam Likely" ? I know that's come up on the list before. AT&T displays "Telemarketer"; do they do it that way too, or do they use a Google Android feature for that which they enable as part of their carrier defaults for carrier-issued phones? What about other carriers and Android? As far as I know, Apple don't do anything like this. Do people with iPhones just not receive this "service"? How does that work? Asking where the central, or the most influential authority lies and who provides it goes to the heart of the real question, which is: what can a legitimate business do if their number has been blacklisted this way? As I understand it, the maintainers of these lists, along with the criteria for getting on them, are elusive and inscrutable, and there's really no recourse and no appeals process. I furthermore understand that this has led to the widespread approach of rotating ANIs, but that's a losing battle; they get flagged too. I imagine it won't be long before the criteria for "Scam Likely" are just "number appears to call lots of numbers in this rate centre and otherwise hasn't been around very long". But this is all just conjecture on my part; I really don't know much about how my carrier, anyone's carrier, or some BigCo that's behind my mobile OS decides that a call is a "telemarketer" or "scam" call. If anyone can shed some light on how this really works and what, if anything can be done about it, I would be most appreciative. -- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC Tel: +1-706-510-6800 / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/

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Connecting to Remote Tandems
by voiceops＠ics-il.net July 9, 2021

July 9, 2021

I'm evaluating methods of extending our footprint. I purposely left out company names. One of the companies we talked to was really only interested in getting us the inbound long distance calls, not the local ones. Well, they would, but the terms were vastly different. Given that I still need to build out to connect to the local tandem, what's the point in using a third party to connect to long distance? Are the terms for connecting to the local tandems different because the access tandem is simpler, whereas the local tandem could potentially involve connections to a bunch of other switches, once volume dictated I needed direct connections... and they don't want to deal with that? Are there third parties that don't have vastly different terms for local tandem services? Also, is it likely that I just don't understand what's going on? I went circles with the sales rep to make sure I understood what he was saying, but I could be wrong. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com

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Three Digit Numbers
by voiceops＠ics-il.net May 15, 2020

May 15, 2020

What three digit numbers are commonly in use and how are people routing them? Obviously there's 911 and that has a whole routing ecosystem. What about 811? 311? X11? What other special numbers are people handling? ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com

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Multi-tenant Fax Server
by jvoip5060＠gmail.com April 21, 2020

April 21, 2020

I work for a small ITSP that is looking to bring fax in house. Need to do fax to e-mail, e-mail to fax, as well as ATA's connected to fax machines. Our upstream voice providers support T.38, I'm just not sure what server / software to use. If any one can point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated. Thank you, Jamie

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