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1 edit | Has it occurred to anyone... Has it occurred to anyone that this might be more of the anti-VoIP crap that's being spread around by the disinformation agents working for the second- and third-tier local telephone companies, that do not want to see traditional landline phone service replaced by VoIP? I'll bet that if you dug deeply enough you'd find that a lot of this FUD has its genesis in the public relations firms hired by the "telephone associations" to push their agenda.
When the Internet first took off you started seeing negative stories about the Internet for the same reason - neither the phone companies nor the media types appreciated the fact that the Internet was taking away their business (people sent IM's and e-mail instead of making phone calls, and surfed the web instead of viewing so much TV or buying newspapers and magazines). So all of a sudden you started seeing all these news reports that if you didn't know any better would have made you think that the Internet was nothing more than a haven for sex perverts and thieves (even today it's rare to see the major media run a positive news story about the Internet). Well, if the phone companies hated the Internet, they loathe VoIP (except, of course, for the companies that are planning their own VoIP deployment) and they are certainly not above trying to manipulate public opinion to associate VoIP with negative things like telemarketing and lack of "enhanced" 911, while not mentioning the positives, like people saving some of their hard-earned money or being able to spend time talking to friends and relatives without having to limit conversations because a meter is running somewhere.
For stories like this, maybe we need a new acronym - PRUP - Public Relations' Untrue Propaganda! Because so far it is untrue - no one is receiving 150 calls a day, and if ever people started receiving that many calls you can rest assured the system would collapse under its own weight because no one would tolerate that. Heck, if I got 150 telemarketing calls a day you can bet I'd set up some sort of call screening system and ONLY accept calls from people I know, and I'll bet most other people would feel forced to do that also. And if you were telemarketing and your ad was one of the 150 that someone had received that day, what would be the actual chances of making a sale? People would become so immune to telemarketing calls that no one would be able to sell anything that way (oh, how I wish that were already true!).
One other thing, it is not true that it would be impossible to block such calls. As long as customers can set up their own filters, they can block calls from whomever they want. A few local phone companies and the VoIP company VoicePulse allow customers to filter calls in various ways based on the calling number. And you can prevent a lot of spoofing Caller ID over VoIP by matching the country and area code information to the IP address at the VoIP to PSTN gateway - if the call originates from an IP address in China but appears to have a U.S. Caller ID, you strip that Caller ID info out as invalid before releasing it to the PSTN. I think laws will be passed sooner or later to deal with Caller ID spoofing anyway. It may be a technical challenge to give customers the tools to block such calls but I can guarantee you those challenges would be addressed if everyone started getting 150 telemarketing calls a day! | | |
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 cdruGo ColtsPremium,MVM
join:2003-05-14
Fort Wayne, IN
kudos:5
 ·Frontier FiOS
| said by WhyADuck:For stories like this, maybe we need a new acronym - PRUP - Public Relations' Untrue Propaganda! Because so far it is untrue - no one is receiving 150 calls a day, and if ever people started receiving that many calls you can rest assured the system would collapse under its own weight because no one would tolerate that. Heck, if I got 150 telemarketing calls a day you can bet I'd set up some sort of call screening system and ONLY accept calls from people I know, and I'll bet most other people would feel forced to do that also. And if you were telemarketing and your ad was one of the 150 that someone had received that day, what would be the actual chances of making a sale? People would become so immune to telemarketing calls that no one would be able to sell anything that way (oh, how I wish that were already true!). I agree. This really is FUD. Maybe there is a little truth in there somewhere, but the 150 number is just something someone pulled out of their ass. No one is ever going to get called 150 a day for marketing crap.
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JPCass
join:2001-01-23
Denver, CO | said by cdru: I agree. This really is FUD. Maybe there is a little truth in there somewhere, but the 150 number is just something someone pulled out of their ass. No one is ever going to get called 150 a day for marketing crap. Yeah, there is definitely an element of FUD here. But I can remember the day when no one would have believed they'd get a hundred or more e-mails a day making sleazy and often even illegal solicitations, either.
I have wondered for a while if the use of VOIP by overseas call centers didn't have the potential to make sales, and other, calls much cheaper and more frequent. Even 10, 25, or 50 unwanted calls a day would start to get pretty bad. | |
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