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Frank Kemp was working on his computer when his cellphone let out the sound of Mario — from Super Mario Bros. — collecting a coin. That signaled he had a new voice mail message, yet his phone had never rung.
"At first, I thought I was crazy," said Mr. Kemp, a video editor in Dover, Del. "When I checked my voice mail, it made me really angry. It was literally a telemarketing voice mail to try to sell telemarketing systems."
Mr. Kemp had just experienced a technology gaining traction called ringless voice mail, the latest attempt by telemarketers and debt collectors to reach the masses. The calls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a voice mail box — to the surprise and (presumably) irritation of the recipient, who cannot do anything to block them.
Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue that these messages should not qualify as calls and, therefore, should be exempt from consumer protection laws that ban similar types of telephone marketing.
But consumer advocates, technology experts, people who have been inundated with these calls and the lawyers representing them say such an exemption would open the floodgates. Consumers' voice mail boxes would be clogged with automated messages, they say, making it challenging to unearth important calls, whether they are from an elderly mother's nursing home or a child's school.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:28PM (1 child)
I set up a voicepulse business IAX line like a decade ago and they converted the next month to SIP which was pretty annoying. I do pay as you go outgoing which yeah is just a couple cents and never adds up to much, and I'm unclear how much I'm paying for inward maybe $11/month
Maybe I can get cheaper but it certainly works well and I don't want the "$2/month webhosting" class of VOIP line, may as well just disconnect.
With the pay as I go it feels like I toss about $20 in there about every month but I donno. That would be the $250.
I have four channels available although I've never used them all, its their default service. I think I could pay more for 8 or 16 channels. It is business class service...
Agreed, but they tend to be consistent which is all I need. I'm pretty brutal so if I/we don't know you, you hit my voicemail I don't even ring. It takes me like 30 seconds to alter my dialplan to permit a new number to ring.
Yeah you're doing what Republic Wireless and Google Fi are doing as a service.
I periodically rebuild my infrastructure so if I don't drop landlines completely, I'll look into that.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday June 06 2017, @09:55PM
That's not what I was recommending. For ~$1/mo you can get a carrier grade line. For an extra $1/mo you can add e911 service to it. I've only ever used Flowroute, and I've put hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, calls through them. They're carrier grade. Nearly every time I've had a problem, it's been me and my Asterisk boxes. They're super nice and helpful. Maybe two big issues in like 10 years. Easily three 9's of service, and if my systems were better, probably four 9's.
I'm sure there are "webhosting" grade services out there, but that is the whole point of a carrier grade aggregator. They review quality continuously, and add and remove routes as required.
Trust me. You can get carrier grade, or business class, service without breaking the bank anymore.
I have unlimited channels both inbound and outbound. All they care about is if I paid. They used to have a virtual PRI service which was based on channels and unlimited minutes, but that went away a few years ago. So no busy signal BS, and your systems can always take the call.
You may wish to reconsider and look into it a bit more. I don't use anything less than carrier grade myself. I'm looking into creating my SRV records so that people could just call me at my domain, and that should result in an encrypted connection. Something the PSTN does not have.
Please don't cave and let the cellular service run your communications. That's in nobody's best interests :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.