In the last 30 days, we’ve blocked 3.4m “nuisance” calls on the Simwood network. That’s 3.4m opportunities for people to be harassed, robbed, or aggressively sold to denied.
Our logic applies unconditionally to all inbound calls, including ported-in numbers, just not to those numbers ported away (it’s not spite – those are the rules). It also applies to outbound calls from our customers and, to be perfectly honest, we’ve had occasion to ‘have a word’ with the odd customer, and another is no longer a customer. It is even applied on calls to third party numbers brought into us over our ever more popular BYoC service – yes, your other carriers could clean their traffic easily this way. Whether a customer of our Carrier Services or consuming our Hosted Business or Residential service through a white-label partner, this protection is active 24x7x365 and we’re committed to making it the best in the business. Empirically, it already is but that’s because nobody else bothers!
This problem is solvable, but it requires effort. It requires effort from the Regulator to ensure that rules which have been in place for decades are actually enforced – us unilaterally enforcing them would take 38% of the traffic off the network! It requires effort from other carriers to do something to identify and block problem flows, rather than simply seeking to monetise them through dirty origin surcharges. That is actual investment through both direct cost and foregone revenue. We’re developing continuously and this month alone have 3.4m calls we’ve chosen not to be paid for and accounts we’ve chosen to jettison the revenue from – that takes conviction and sanction from the very top. It takes effort from networks and resellers to improve KYC and make efforts to filter who is signing up and ensure they don’t have carte-blanche to run an unrestricted number of calls presenting any CLI they choose – you’d be amazed what we’ve seen. In his recent blog, Pete wasn’t kidding when he said the subject of a current Ofcom investigation was rejected by us in under 30 seconds.
Sadly, we don’t see that effort, and those which are rejected by us, or our peers which take this seriously, end up on other networks. We hear those networks talking. We hear their theory presented as fact. We hear virtue signalling; oh, so much virtue signalling. Panels on how to combat the problem. Delegations to talk hypothetically to Regulators and the Government. Presentations recycling other people’s material. This is nothing more than posturing and seeking to be seen to care and total and utter pretence at knowing what they’re talking about (or diverting attention away from them being the problem). It reminds me of the 2000s when we were alone in researching and doing something to combat fraud while everyone else was just talking and creaming off the bonus revenue.
This summer, we’re sponsoring the CCUK Summer Forum. I offered to share some of our statistics and findings in this field there but the organisers declined. I was reluctantly invited to join a panel to talk hypothetically with theorists but facts evidently weren’t welcome. Accordingly, for all those attending, and any Simwood customers, we’re going to be running a webinar sometime afterwards with useful information – if you’re interested put your name down below. We think sharing what we’re learning with peers matters if we’re to combat this problem as a mature industry – “let’s pretend” is for kids.
For those who disagree, I’d ask you to cast your mind back to the naughties. Remember what a problem spam was? It was estimated to be 85% of email traffic in 2004. Then Gmail came out and now just 0.1% slips through. Those providers who didn’t care saw market shares plummet, despite having no choice but to up their game. Twenty years later Gmail still held a 36% market share because end-users craved clean inboxes and wanted a provider who cared. Voice is harder, telephone calls are not on the ascendant like email and we’re not Google; but consumers really care about this stuff so woe betide anyone who thinks it doesn’t matter or can just be virtue-signalled into the long grass.
We often refer to King Canute and the tide of consumer sentiment at Simwood; that story is quite apt here. If we don’t fix the problem, the banks and their multi-million pound lobbying capability will ensure it is fixed for us. That is no joke or academic theory – the House of Lords is already calling for CPs to be held financially liable for fraud; the sane voices in the upper chamber are increasingly limited. We are facing a very real threat of virtue-signalling inaction creating an existential threat for our industry. Talk is cheap; removing nuisance calls from your network isn’t. But will be cheaper than compensating Doris for sending £40,000 to a Nigerian prince.
