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BT Announces Free Service To Screen Nuisance Callers (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: British telco BT is launching a free landline service for UK customers which promises to divert millions of unwanted calls. A dedicated team at BT will monitor calls made to UK numbers, across its network of over 10 million domestic landlines, to identify suspicious patterns, which could help to filter out nuisance callers. The flagged numbers will then be directed to a junk voicemail box. The company has estimated that the voicemail 'net' will catch up to 25 million cold calls every week. It explained that to achieve this success rate, it would be deploying enormous amounts of compute power to monitor and analyse large amounts of data in real-time.
The problem with the way the international telecommunications systems are set up is that no, you dont know where the call originates from, just that a network next to yours is handing it to you - its essentially one massive Tor network where the upstream routing information passed around cannot be trusted. You bill the person than handed it to you, they bill the person that handed it to them and so on.
This is why Indian call centres can buy blocks of a million phone numbers, hit UK targets all week and not be penalised for it.
BT cant solve this on their own, because that would require them to be able to force other telecoms companies to solve their own problems with the setup or simply reject 99% of all international calls made.