On Apr 2, 2011, at 12:12 PM, Alex Balashov wrote:

On 04/02/2011 11:17 AM, Nick Reifschneider wrote:

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Does anyone have information on a good product that can help detect and prevent dialer traffic from hitting a network. We currently limit CPS which helps although that throttles the good with the bad traffic. We don?t have a bunch of it however it?s enough that we?d like to reduce the volume.

The solution we see is usually billing policy-based; aggressive surcharges when >= x% of calls have an average duration of <= y sec.

But in a scenario where the dialer traffic is headed in your direction, you definitely need more. For example, suppose you use Level3 for origination, and Delta cancels all flights, and starts blasting calls toward all your users via the PSTN. Delta isn't your customer. Level3 isn't your customer; they're your vendor. You may bill your users for calls toward the user, but no one user is generating or receiving a substantial number of these. One line of research is to make dialers behave better: that's a current goal in one of my client's projects. A proper dialer really shouldn't tax the network unduly. There are proven algorithms for avoiding congestion while maximizing throughput, but so far none of the dialer vendors have embraced them. But sorry Nick, I don't know of any products either. For simplistic dialers, where the calling party number is consistent, I could imagine that the SBC vendors could implement a feature; e.g., "no more than 10 concurrent calls from the same calling party number". But many of the modern dialers are using lots of different calling party numbers, and they're routing across many different carriers to reach their customers. mark at ecg.co | +1-229-316-0013 | http://ecg.co/lindsey