Ofcom misses the point

The fair telecoms campaign has long been pursuing Ofcom over its persistent (mis-)use of its powers to address persistent misuse of telecommunications networks and services.

Our media release in response to yesterday's announcement of a further (in)Action Plan is found at http://tiny.cc/FTMR_inaction.

Ofcom's powers cover any business with a UK presence that instigates misuse, even if it is conducted from outside the EU. The key point is that Ofcom has a policy that knowingly and deliberately tolerates Silent Calls.

Many of the complaints that Ofcom receives identify the perpetrator of Silent Calls, but it takes no action because it deems the relevant activity to be acceptable.

On the wider issue of nuisance calls, the only way to ensure that this issue is properly addressed will be for a citizen-focussed agency to deal with the problem as a whole, ensuring that the statutory powers of the respective regulators and the influence of others are properly and effectively engaged. See - http://tiny.cc/FTBlog_NCProps.

Surely there's an easy way to fix this

Each telco tags/logs which telco/exchange it received calls from as it passes it on.

If you get a nuisance call, you enter a few digits on your phone (like a call-back request) and the telco traces the source of the call and issues a request to its upstream routing partner for the same data.

Pretty quickly you find the source of the calls. If no caller-id is provided or it looks dubious, the telco appends data to the caller-id information.

If you automatically offer full routing information to ipv6 VOIP users, that might help push things along for ipv6 too.

There's fun to be had

Rather than just hanging up, I've decided to have some fun with the calls that are doing a "lifestyle questionnaire".

Q: What's your annual salary?

A: 2 guineas, 14 shillings and sixpence, although last year I elected to be paid via a barter system so technically it was 2 swans, a boar, six pigs and a flaggon of ale.

Q: Do you own your property or do you rent?

A: My property is actually still based on the old fuedal system, so technically I'm a serf to the lord of the manor.

Q: Do you receive your television by cable or satellite?

A: I get the data sent to me on 5 1/4 inch floppies and then install the programs from those direct to my Edison Vision-O-Scope viewing device.

Nothing is guaranteed to confuse "Brian" from India any faster!

I'm on TPS but was cold-called by BT yesterday

trying to flog me their broadband.

If BT can't be trusted, who can?

best way is to use your own equipment to screen the calls. works a treat, not infalable, but cuts nearly all unwanted calls.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/29661

Needs more sigs though...

"Many people use the Telephone Preference Service to opt out of cold calling, which works well enough for calls originating in the UK"

Complete bollox. TPS may reduce the number of cold calls but I still get plenty. I made an FOI enquiry to see what happens if you complain. In summary if they get a lot of complaints about the same company they'll send them a "please stop doing that" letter. Although there is legislation allowing fines of up to £5000 for each offending call made that power has never been exercised.

The marketing industry lobby extensively to claim this is a legitimate means of marketing and say "what's the problem, if you gat a call you don't want, just put the phone down"

If you tell a caller this is a TPS registered number the response is one of: they put the phone down; they say they'll add you to their do not call list; they'll claim they do use the TPS but "you need to renew your registration every year" (not true); They'll claim you (or someone in your household) has ticked a box on an enquiry form or competition entry to agree to accept calls from them. The response I got from an Indian sounding gentleman, he asked "Can I speak to the householder" I said "Who is calling" to which his response, anticipating that I was an awkward customer, was "F! off you C!", a phrase I suspect he had learnt from making other such calls.

Indeed (despite being on TPS) I get several unwanted "sales" calls a week, if the caller sounds Indian he risks an abusive response - my Bank uses Indian call centres and so has fallen foul of this policy...

I don't pick the phone up for "number withheld" calls but let them go to answerphone but that too results in losing some legitimate callers.

I think Telcos should automatically provide CLI and not charge extra for it.

One partial solution might be for a telco to offer a filtering service, rather like the expensive truecall device/service. You can have a personal database of legitimate callers, and a blacklist, others get an answerphone. Blacklists could be aggregated and repeat offender numbers identified and shared.

There's even a problem now with CLI numbers, it is possible to send a fake CLI. There are legitimate and approved uses for example a Doctor wishing to call a patient from his domestic line can have his surgery number displayed as CLI . Abuses are often obvious fakes like 1111111 but can be the real number of another organisation who will then risk becoming the recipient of TPS complaints and abusive calls.

Hmmm

Lots of uninformed comment on here, usually starting with "It's simple". The Dunning-Kruger effect in full force.

Some facts;

The technical and commercial model telcos use means they only know who gave the call to them. They don't have a commercial or technical relationship with the call the network originated on unless it's the preceding one.

BT are a minority player in international calls in the UK now. Most international calls arriving in the UK don't arrive at a BT facility. There's every chance an incoming international call will never touch BT's network.

CLI is easily spoofed. A telco who doesn't police what their customers are doing very well will let fake CLIs into the PSTN. It's less likely to happen in the UK or Western Europe, but not impossible.

Given that CLI is easily spoofed, white lists or black lists are pointless as you're not blocking what you think you are. The legitimate owner of the number can no longer make calls, the faker just uses another one.

Because of the 'immediate preceding' operator approach, you can't block calls from telcos who let dodgy CLIs onto their network because you don't know that any given call came from that network. If I'm a telco in the UK who uses someone like Arbinet to bring me incoming international calls I don't even have that - I have no idea who sent me that call.

Because CLI can be spoofed, or because reformatting can render it useless, telcos tend to mark non-domestic calls as 'INTERNATIONAL'. The exception to this rule is where the operator sending me the call is also the network it originated on - so if a France Telecom user dials a UK number and France Telecom pass that to me directly, I'll probably trust the CLI. Those dedicated inbound routes from one supplier are increasingly rare these days - deregulation and scores of operators in countries means that it's more efficient to use someone like Arbinet than negotiate hundreds of direct interconnection agreements.

If you chose to opt out of receiving calls from, say, India - callers would fake their CLI to make it look like another country. You'd end up with everyone opting out of everything and the callers still getting through. Many legitimate call centres will legally show a UK CLI anyway as the call doesn't enter the PSTN until it reaches the UK. The call centre will be part of a UK bank's private voice network, the call stays on it until it reaches the PSTN gateway in the UK.

The only feasible solution to this is to address the problems commercially - and given that this is often cross border and beyond the reach of national telecom regulators or legal authorities - that means EU legislation.