Reply to post: This is not how telephone service works

The FCC has finally, finally approved a half-decent plan to destroy the robocall scourge... but there's a catch

rshpount

This is not how telephone service works

Cell phone companies do not make any money from robocalls. Most of the cell phone plans are flat rate with no per minute charges for inbound calls. Also, a lot of robocallers pretend to place calls from the same local calling area as terminating number, so that they can place them as local calls and pay nothing. Cell phone companies, on the other hand pay for inbound local calls to local exchange carriers. Only people who make money on robocallers are long distance carriers (inter exchange carriers), but even they, in their majority, prefer to stay from robocalls. Only long distance carriers who specialize in high volume callers (callers who generate a lot of calls with small connection ratio), take this traffic. There are about five or six companies in US who do this. If you make them behave, robocalls stop.

All that FCC did was posturing. They are pressured to do something, so they are doing something. Like "letting" phone companies to enable some magic "analytics" to block robocalls. Since this is optional, carriers do not actually need to do anything and most likely will not. At most, they will now block calls pretending to be local from unassigned numbers. This will cut their costs and will improve customer experience.

Oh, and if you want a fee to be angry about, look at USF. This is a fee which is set by the FCC chair and can be spent at his discretion. It is currently set at 18% of any communication charges. Technically FCC chair can spend this money on buying himself a new horse farm or a golden coffee mug, but this would be too on the nose. What he does do, is issue extremely lucrative contracts to his personal friends, like providing internet to schools at 10x the market rate.

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