Blending Politics and Inter-carrier Voice
Why in the world would we be talking about politics and inter-carrier voice in the same sentence? What could politics and inter-carrier voice possibly have to do with each other? No, we aren’t talking about President Obama, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or any political leader. We are actually talking about the robocalls that politicians make in the hopes of reaching voters and getting their “message” heard. For the life of us, we can’t understand how or why they think this is successful and actually could have the possibility of improving voter turn out or election results. But that’s not the point of this blog post. Those calls actually generate significant opportunities for U.S. domestic carriers, but they generate headaches too. These robocalls, or dialer calls, consume network resources and negatively impact a carrier's overall performance from a quality and network yield perspective. But, as 2016 gets underway and the U.S. Presidential Campaign season intensifies, the volume of these calls are going to increase by a significant order of magnitude. What is a carrier to do?
If you ask carriers, the actual owners of the termination network, they give you the standard response: “ We don’t accept those calls on our network”. It's a classic “non-denial denial”, which is perfect political speak. They may not “accept” those calls on their network, but that doesn’t mean those calls don’t go through their network. Almost every carrier has clauses in their termination services agreement that specifically addresses the type of dialer traffic we are talking about here. Such as, how much of their overall traffic can be dialer like, what the consequences are if that percentage is exceeded, etc. In turn, the purveyors of these calls have developed sophisticated algorithms to distribute these calls across a multitude of carriers and combine these calls with traditional “Conversational” traffic. The goal, of course, is to maximize the utilization of the terminating networks for these dialer calls, while at the same time not invoking any of the contractual consequences (penalties, removal from route, etc). In short, they are blending these dialer calls with conversational calls.
Carriers, both the originators and terminators, need the tools to monitor, alert & alarm on these types of calls. Ignoring them, just doesn’t make good business sense. That’s why GCS, and several of our peers, have developed the tools and capabilities necessary for carriers to accurately and effectively manage this type of traffic mix, intelligently. Our Dynamic Blending Module keeps the purveyors from violating their contractual thresholds and our OLAP based Reporting & Alarming tools allows terminating carriers to track, see and manage this traffic.
How are you managing this traffic?