Challenge-Response Now Available On CallCentric [telecom]

Per Telecom Digest Moderator:

Yeah... my immediate reaction upon reading the announcement was "I hope that's not all there is to it...".

For starters, they need something like "3 strikes and you're out" where the caller either gets flipped to voicemail or totally locked out after that ID hits n incorrect keys. That would be needed to prevent limitless successive calls - each pressing a different key.

Multiple key combinations would help too: "23" instead of "2", or even "234". At some level of random combination tries needed, I would hope the economics tip in favor of the phone user.

And a whitelist for people I know - so they don't even get the prompt... Especially a whitelist that learns: somebody gets through to me and, if I don't press the special "Blacklist This Turkey" key combo during the call, their ID gets added to the whitelist. Probably not that useful for blocking calls because of ID spoofing - but a nice touch for the people that I know who call: if i neglected to add them to the whitelist, at least they'd only have to enter the digit on the first call.

No, Callcentric has fairly elaborate call treatments. Rather than guessing, you can read about them here:

Per John Levine:

Reading that, I come away thinking they have the whitelist part, but not the auto-add-to-whitelist or 3-strikes-and-you're-out.

Having said that, they have me seriously considering porting my POTS number to CallCentric and discontinuing my Verizon service altogether.

As it is, I have all non-800/non911 outgoing routed to CallCentric - with CallCentric spoofing my Verizon number.... but have all incoming on Verizon and all outgoing 800/911 on Verizon.

I'd guess it will take wider deployment of challenge-response features and a year or two before telemarketers adapt and start calling the same number over-and-over - issuing a different digit in response to the challenge with each call until they get a connection.

I'm pretty happy with them. Remember that you need a broadband connection if you plan to use a VoIP device to make or receive calls.

If you want that other stuff, get an old PC and run Asterisk on it. Callcentric is happy to deliver calls to it.

R's, John

Asterisk is, IMHO, a good example of the changes in both the telephone network and in average users' approach to it. I think we can all agree that the "central office" is in the process of becoming a network access point, and I'm suddenly not sure if we're considering all that's involved.

Consider the premise that leads to a POTS user switching to something like Asterisk: on the one hand, Asterisk offers capabilities that many local phone companies do not -

1. Selective diversion of calls based on codes entered by the caller
2. Call screening based on origininating area code and/or exchange code
3. Digital voice recordings which can be transferred by email

On the other, Asterisk requires end users to bear a lot of extra costs -

1. The time to learn the system and the software
2. Expenses for special-purpose phones and/or special-function computer interfaces
3. Support costs, such as for UPS protection and internal wiring, spare phones and interface cards, and software backups
4. Software mainenance, upgrades, and security

The point is that I am more concerned about the benefits that home-based endpoints deliver relative to their costs than I was in years past. The chance to have a telemouseketier's automatic system be forced to guess what /my/ automatic system will accept is just the next step in an arms race which we are entering into without any debate about whether it should be dealt with by other means, such as with legislation that puts meaningful teeth into the enforcement provisions of the laws that created the do-not-call list.

Bill