I can't speak for most other carriers, but from what I've found from personal experience is that most carriers will set up a "choke trunk group" to a ss7 TDM for the toll free routing. This choke group will probably only have 10 cic's associated with it and then set up a method of overflow for the inevitable excess. In previous call traces I have made during American idol times, I do not see an ACM coming back, mostly it's a ANM due to no ringing and immediate answer. Having delt with customers in the past with choke groups, cell phones always seem to be able to complete calls to heavily dialed numbers in the past. It's usually an issue of the originating carriers capacity and not an issue of the terminating end's capacity. I would not say that american idol terminating end is "using resources" as we are being compensated from our customers for being able to place calls and the american idol numbers are compensated from american idol for opening and running the toll free numbers and the influx of calls. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carlos Alcantar" <carlos at race.com> To: "VoiceOps" <voiceops at voiceops.org> Sent: Wednesday, May 5, 2010 5:50:17 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain Subject: [VoiceOps] American Idol 800 Numbers So last night I was looking around our calls flowing thru our switch noticed a big spike in calls going to toll free numbers figured out it was American idol. I started digging deeper and I noticed that none of these calls where getting a connected status back from American idol. I did some random test to the different numbers and confirmed was never getting a connection status back. I also went ahead and tested from an att / Verizon cell phones and in both cases the cell phone still saying calling while it was playing back the American idol msg. so if I?m reading everything that I have collected correctly American idol is basically using our resources without having to compensate all the different carries for the calls. Anyone else seeing this? Carlos Alcantar Race Telecommunications, Inc. 101 Haskins Way South San Francisco, CA 94080 P: 650.649.3550 x143 F: 650.649.3551 E: carlos *@* race.com _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops

On 05 May 2010 18:50, Carlos Alcantar wrote:

So last night I was looking around our calls flowing thru our switch noticed a big spike in calls going to toll free numbers figured out it was American idol. I started digging deeper and I noticed that none of these calls where getting a connected status back from American idol. I did some random test to the different numbers and confirmed was never getting a connection status back. I also went ahead and tested from an att / Verizon cell phones and in both cases the cell phone still saying calling while it was playing back the American idol msg. so if I?m reading everything that I have collected correctly American idol is basically using our resources without having to compensate all the different carries for the calls. Anyone else seeing this?

It is fairly standard practice for toll-free numbers with a non-trivial volume to not "connect" the call until an actual human answers; all of the recorded messages, menus, etc. are actually done via ring-back. This is why, if you have your phone/gateway/etc. ring-back timers set below 3-5 minutes, or some bug is preventing proper handling of ring-back media (in both directions, so DTMF gets through), you will get inundated with user complaints that don't seem to make a lot of sense. S -- Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking