The two biggest carriers have a 1-2% monthly churn rate.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/283511/average-monthly-c...
That’ll probably require fixing the broken design of the telephone system.
At a technical level, spam filtering relies heavily on analyzing email text. Doing similar analysis on voice calls is way harder. Also, there's UI issues. You can redirect suspected spam emails to a folder the user can inspect for false positives. What do you do with a call that hits the robocall filter?
More details here: https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/fcc-clarifies-robocal...
Note that Ajit Pai (then a commissioner, not chairperson like now) voted AGAINST this.
Full disclosure: We (Nomorobo) advocated to the FCC to allow carriers to block robocalls.
All this occurs against the background of the Communications Act's common-carrier obligations, and the FCC's call-completion rules, which generally prohibit blocking calls. What the FCC did in the order you linked is to simply say "nothing in the Communications Act or our rules or orders prohibits carriers or VoIP providers from implementing call-blocking technology that can help consumers who choose to use such technology to stop unwanted robocalls."
Is that a safe harbor? No, as the next sentence clarifies, what can be blocked depends on the nature of the call: "Additionally, in the interests of public safety, we strongly encourage carriers, VoIP providers, and independent call-blocking service providers to avoid blocking autodialed or prerecorded calls from public safety entities, including PSAPs, emergency operations centers, or law enforcement agencies; blocking these calls may compromise the effectiveness of local and state emergency alerting and communications programs."
As explained in other posts here, it's hard for a carrier to tell what is a robocall. What is an "unwanted" robocall is even harder--it's a heavily-litigated issue in the TCPA context. (In fact, the rest of the order was about expanding what counts as an unwanted robocall in violation of the TCPA).
That leaves carriers between a rock and a hard place--it they block over-inclusively, businesses who think they fall into a TCPA exception could sue them for violating their common-carrier obligations. Then they get to litigate whether that business falls within the scope of the "unwanted robocalls" the FCC referred to (but did not define). Carriers have a huge incentive to not wander into that morass by offering call-blocking features.
I don't really want my carrier deciding what calls to block. I just want them to ensure the veracity of caller ID data so that I can perform useful blocking at my end. There shouldn't be anything stopping them from removing fraudulent and unverifiable caller ID info from the calls they route my way. That leaves me free to block calls that lack caller ID info, and I'm assuming all the risks that entails.
This makes third party call blocking products a better/easier solution for carriers to recommend as a solution.
That approach could work here.
It’s not clear to me that carriers would be allowed to do that, especially accounting for situations where VoIP traffic is laundered through a legitimate service (so the entity at the exchange boundary with the end-user carrier is a legitimate one).
Could they get around common carrier restrictions by offering that service as opt in? I’m not so sure about that either.
Send it straight to voicemail, where the user can inspect for false positives?
My operator should be able to have a short list of teleoperators in this zip code, and drop other calls.
I think no-one receiving calls from parked non-local voip numbers would be an acceptable price to pay for the elimination of voip spam. You are free to disagree, tech is all about making compromises.
Incidentally, this quickly follows the path we took with SMTP. I can no longer telnet into a random SMTP server and dump incoming mail, which no doubt ruined the carefully honed scripts of many sysadmins.
Telemarketers have learned that certain area codes convert at much higher rates than others. 202, 203, 212, 213 are prime targets. 242, 246, 406 and 701? Notsomuch.
If your NPA isn't important to you, get a number in those areas. (Some carriers will let you choose your area code as long as you're within the same billing center.)
For reference, I've had the same New Jersey mobile number since 2001.
Google Voice has had spam lists forever, it's likely they are pooling the data from there.
T-Mobile does have the ScamID/block thing that can be controlled by shortcode. Documentation here https://explore.t-mobile.com/callprotection
Stuff it’s more confident about gets blocked outright. I think they’re automating what they’d do if you went into your account and manually blocked a number.
Carriers have no economic incentive to do this. Most people on AT&T aren't going to jump to Verizon because of the number of robocalls they get on AT&T. It's not worth the hassle of changing.
I remember at one of the WWDC keynotes, Tim Cook announced this as a new iPhone feature. But he also noted that it was only available in China. I wonder if whatever the Chinese carriers have done can be imported to the United States.
My wife's iPhone will occasionally get an incoming call with small text below reading "Possible spam." She never uses her phone for voice, so she never answers the phone anyway.
When the isp wars were going strong, before broadband put everyone under the thumb of monopolists and also before gmail, spam filtering was a serious competative advantage.
Why can’t phone companies take an RBL like approach? If your VoIP service garners too many complaints because you are selling to robocallers then you don’t get to have calls delivered to e.g. ATT mobile customers anymore?
Are there legal or technical interconnection requirements that would make such a thing impossible?