How Junction Networks Deals with Traffic Pumping

Google Voice recently has drawn attention from the Federal Communications Commission for its practice of blocking calls to some high-cost telephone numbers used by free conference calling sites. And it appears Google Voice is not the only provider of affordable calling services that finds the high-cost numbers a problem.

Junction Networks, a provider of hosted business IP telephony, has taken another tack, announcing that it will begin charging a higher fee for outbound calls to those exchanges.

“Free conference calling and other ‘traffic pumping’ services exist because the current carrier compensation system allows rural carriers to pass extremely high fees on to other carriers, who often cannot come close to recovering the cost of calls,” says Rob Wolpov, president, Junction Networks. “As a result, we have been left with an overwhelming increase in fees for calls to a number of rural locations where these services operate.

“In order to maintain our low-cost business VoIP options and at the same time, allow our customers to call any number they choose, we have decided to charge the market rate for calls to the designated areas used by these services," Junction Networks now says.

Free conference calling services, adult chat lines and other “traffic pumping” services are often reached through the telephone exchanges of very small, rural operators. "In a legal but questionable arbitrage scheme, these calling services choose these rural exchanges precisely for their high termination charges -- the fees that sending carriers pay them to complete (terminate) the calls," says Wolpov.

Charging as much as 20 times the typical domestic termination rate, the rural telco then splits the profits with the service. While GoogleVoice has responded by blocking calls to those numbers, Junction Networks prefers the alternative: allowing customers to continue using these services at their discretion, but paying the actual cost of such calls.

Under the newe plan, Junction Networks customers can control the cost of any calls costing more than 2.9 cents per minute by simply completing an online extended dialing form.

Such traffic pumping schemes are expected to be addressed at some point. For the moment, blocking is seen as the lesser evil for some service providers who do not make a living from call termination, though cost-based pricing will make more sense for firms that do charge for calling services.

Google Voice arguably has a different problem. It provides Web-enabled calling features that sometimes require call delivery to such telephone numbers. Sometimes Google Voice provides the actual outbound call origination, rather than processing inbound calls to a user's own telephone numbers. When originating calls to the high-cost terminations, Google Voice has no direct revenue model at all.