Regular readers of my missives will have picked up on my reading (ok, listening to an audiobook) about the history of Google. I’m currently on a chapter where the founders explain they had two projectors in every conference room, one for the main presentation or video link, and one exclusively for data. Data informed every decision, and supposition was discouraged.
What Simwood’s Wilkinator has provided is a veritable cornucopia of data. Suspected scrotitude on the network can be proven, beyond a threshold of reasonable doubt that even a jury of luddites would comprehend. We can look beyond network or account-level holistic metrics and seamlessly go down in far more detail, regardless of ingress/egress point or billing account.
Since implementation, we have only received five complaints; two were “fair cop” when our partner dug into the traffic themselves and took action once they realised what was being sent to them. Two have led us to refine the algorithm, and one, well, good riddance to the foreign entity that appeared to be retailing a service to be used in a rather specific, but nefarious way (I can’t talk about it, as it’s being looked at by various government agencies, but suffice to say, that’s a week of my life I would like back).
The complaint-to-traffic blocking ratio is quite telling – only two false positives amongst millions and millions of call attempts. If anything, it indicates maybe we have been too lax, but there is a limit to how much unilateral action will have an effect for consumers; the traffic just ends up on a network with less controls and your Grandma still gets told she needs to move her life savings to a “special account”.
That, and many quirks of regulation pop up – for example, the UK’s General Condition C6.6 requires a presentation number to be dialable, but that rule binds networks and providers. What if an IT manager misconfigures a PBX and thus renders a number undialable instead of adding an auto-attendant that says “inbound calls only”? There’s a decade or more of lax adherence to standards to undo before the hammer can truly come down. Badly configured genuine services need a chance to right their wrongs, as we risk trading the harm caused by scrotes to harm by overblocking.
But what does this have to do with the 2008 market crash? Without boring you all with an economic history lesson, the 2008 depression had, at its entangled core of causes, the subprime mortgage market. These were packaged into special-purpose vehicles, with some subprime, some AAA-rated mortgages and traded, hedged against, and subject to the entire gamut of financial hocus pocus.
ChatGPT actually puts it well:
SPVs were a key enabler of the financial alchemy that turned risky subprime loans into seemingly safe, high-rated securities. They masked risk, inflated leverage, and created a false sense of security that eventually unravelled—playing a major role in the 2008 financial meltdown.
Our data is telling us that an interconnect, especially (but not exclusively) one at the international gateway, is the telecommunications equivalent of the subprime SPV. At a macro-level, it looks like an ACD of 1.5 minutes, with an ASR of 75%. For many networks, the box is ticked. But that belies the true issue. Drill down into that traffic, and you have some retail conversational traffic masking scrotitude.
While the proverbial man with his head in the oven and his feet in the freezer may be OK on average, the reality is different. Some AAA traffic is masking the subprime traffic, with each interconnect or customer account essentially a form of SPV.
Only by scrutinising traffic more deeply, such as the Wilkinator does (and, by the way, can be used by any network, anywhere in the world, to wash traffic through – if that’s of interest, reach out to us) can you see these patterns. Our algorithms can evaluate the entire package, connect the wheat, and toss the chaff.
This is just one example of how networks, today, can grapple with the issues we face as an industry, without a white elephant central database. Unfortunately, the USA is embracing a paradigm that encourages this SPV mentality for traffic. Granted, that just so happens to favour the incumbents too, but there are better measures.
A major outcome of the 2008 crash was a requirement for banks to hold higher-quality assets in their capitalisation mix. If all telcos did the equivalent with traffic, we might get somewhere.
