Blending Traffic

So, lets talk about that “other topic” that everyone knows about but no one likes to discuss in public,…you know “Blending”. The practice of mixing in dialer traffic with conversational traffic so that the terminating network carrier accepts the overall traffic. First, lets be clear, dialer traffic is real and its growing. As we enter the chaos of the U.S. Presidential Election, dialer traffic is going to explode as “robo-calls” flood the US voice marketplace. How are carriers dealing with it? Well, if you talk to the large network providers in the U.S. they almost unanimously respond with the standard, “ We don’t accept short duration traffic (aka dialer traffic) on our network”. If you ask the voice providers to the candidates and call centers, they say, “ Give us all you got, we can take it”. So, how does this apparent dichotomy exist and yet succeed?

Because saying one thing and doing another is the operating reality of the U.S. Carrier voice market. Carriers have network capacity, Dialer traffic needs a place to land, so the two, inevitably find each other and make it work through Blending. By putting conversational traffic along side the “dialer traffic”, carriers are willing to accept the bad dialer traffic, along with the good “conversational traffic”. Carriers will accept 20% bad traffic with 80% good traffic and try to rigorously monitor these ratios across their network. Not an easy thing to do. Likewise, the purveyors of this bad/short duration dialer traffic want to manage the ratios tightly because there are significant financial penalties associated with violating these ratios. So everyone has an interest in managing the ratios precisely even though the terminating carrier doesn’t want that traffic and the originating service provider has very little conversational traffic to blend.

Its a big mess and yet it works. It works because of companies like ours that provide Blending tools