The Phantom Traffic Menace

Regulators are very good at ensuring that money is wasted and that bad people profit from complicated and ill-conceived rules that supposedly benefit society. In the US, the FCC has been responsible for an incredibly complicated regulatory environment, which has enabled rather than prevented the problem of “phantom traffic”. Networks that carry phantom traffic find themselves unable to bill it because of gaps in the labelling of traffic. A lot of phantom traffic would be billable if the network carrying it just had simple additional data like the calling and called party. There is also much more than a suspicion that unscrupulous telcos are deliberately manipulating data to avoid being billed for traffic. So it is interesting to see that the telco industry can sometimes get its act together and work collectively to push for changes. Take a look at this article in Billing World about an alliance for consistent exchange and management of CDRs in the US. Is this a sign that, even in the US, the telco industry is starting to realise that you can only get the right regulatory framework if you agree the solution first, and involve the regulator second?