OK, picture this: you’re lying in bed and you hear a window smash downstairs. Do you:
- Deal with it. This could be calling the Police or addressing it the country way. Either way, you take direct and immediate action yourself.
- Commit to send an email to your neighbourhood group in the next week, calling for a meeting next month to talk about deteriorating security.
For me, the answer is always A. Maybe it is the self-reliance of being a Gen X, maybe it is [over]confidence from childhood martial arts, but I’ve always favoured just getting on and dealing with stuff. Don’t get me wrong, some things need a collective approach but for me that is a case of I’ll deal with it myself, you deal with it yourself, and we’ll share best practice and information so we all improve.
I struggle to imagine anyone reading this blog electing for option B, and yet I see it every day – or rather every month as there’s never any urgency – in telecoms. There seems to be this view that talking about it not only makes you an ‘expert’ who gets invited to talk more, but also passes as doing something. You can gloat to your customers how you’re in this talking shop, or having a chat with that important person, or Chairing this talking group and they can go “wow, you’re amazing and you really care”. But if the total action from this is still zero, that is pretty disingenuous. The problem has not been addressed, you’ve taken zero steps towards addressing it, and your information/learning to enable you to address it in the future is unchanged. So what was the point?
I have no doubt that at least some in our industry choose this path because it is zero cost and high reward. Why spend money actually dealing with the problem when you can get all (if not more) credit for talking about the need to deal with it? Why give up that profit stream when you can keep milking it? Win win! Hell, maybe you can even buy an award for your efforts talking and go for the triple win.
Whatever the intent or outcome, for me it demonstrates a lack of integrity either way.
It astonishes me that buyers of telecoms services don’t see through this. It is the equivalent of being wheeled into A&E on a trolley and the Doctor saying, having only seen a note about your admission, “that’s fascinating, I must share what I haven’t seen at the next forum on things we’ve no experience of”. He knows no more, he’s done nothing to save your life, but he can at least talk about what he hasn’t seen and didn’t do with others who didn’t see and haven’t done. Is that the kind of Doctor you want when your life depends on it or the kind of company you want supplying you? I’d hope not, but the talking shops give an aura of seniority, a veneer of bullshit, maybe with awards layered on, that reassure them.
Let us be clear: capitalising on that is lying. It isn’t marketing, it isn’t misunderstanding, it isn’t even harmless spin – it is lies.
Personally, I’d much sooner be saved by the Doctor with no public profile to speak of but who quietly spent ten years in the military in Afghanistan, spends no time talking about it, but is willing and evidently able to get hands-on. Wouldn’t you?
The talking topic du jour relates to Nuisance Calls and it has done for a few years. Strangely it has been since we started being vocal about what we were doing. Yes, what we were doing seemed to trigger a response of others talking. They seem to think it stops there though. At a conference nearly two years ago one of these talking people said to me that we need to share data and that seems to be the narrative doing the rounds. I’d ask: what data are we sharing, you don’t have any? You have absolutely no data I don’t have myself, and you have absolutely no information because you’ve done nothing, so what exactly are we sharing? The only interpretation is: let Simwood do all the work and get all the data while we continue to profit; then if we ever actually have to act, we can just use theirs. Pathetic.
You could call me cynical and paranoid but history bears this out. It is well over a decade since I presented on what we were doing about VoIP Fraud at an ITSPA event. I introduced ThreatSTOP who we were working with and made the pitch that we could collectively feed into a system we were already populating, along with publishing our data for community use, but which would be much stronger if more – especially larger – networks did the same. Response: crickets. Well, my slides got repurposed a lot by ‘experts’ talking about voice fraud, and it started lots of talking about it generally but did anybody do anything? Of course not.
Years later though, someone had the genius idea that ITSPA (now CCUK) could pay one of its members to collect data and pool it which they went ahead with. That was right at the time we were blogging that the threat had moved on and we were handling it in a very different way. Of course they had no historic data as the time in between had been utterly squandered, so they asked if they could use ours. I declined, they took it anyway and we stopped publishing publicly as a result. Their project seemed to die a few years later, perhaps because the threat had evolved and needed to be handled in a different way.
So here we are again. Everyone is talking about nuisance calls, there are cries to share data, but there is no data to speak of. Meanwhile, the vulnerable in our society continue to get robbed, their service providers continue to profit from it (on both sides), trust in the very system our collective livelihoods depend on continues to be eroded, and some of those who talk the most are more complicit than they’ll ever know because they’ve done absolutely nothing to understand or mitigate the problem.
We have the data, we have receipts, we’re investing money (and jettisoning revenue) to combat the problem. The problem itself is eminently solvable but it needs the rest of the industry to join in. That requires the Regulator to say, in no uncertain terms: “stop talking about what you don’t understand and get on with understanding and fixing it”. We stand very willing and able to contribute to that process.
In the meantime, if you or your customers want a network which is actively shunning over 5% of calls (as spam or scam), and that is net of problem customers who have been culled which could make the figure much higher, and legitimately wants the PSTN to be spam and scam free, give us a call.
