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April 05, 2009
What is Traffic Pumping?
Creating an artificial spike in calls to a specific location is known as "traffic pumping" or "traffic inflation." Traffic pumpers are companies who seek to inflate traffic to certain locations in order to abuse the inter-carrier compensation system. These illegal schemes abuse the system intended to keep the price of basic telephone service affordable for rural customers. (Source: http://broadband.wordpress.com/2007/05/09/sprint-nextel-fights-traffic-pumping-schemes/ )
Traffic pumpers make their money by first obtaining a number, or number range, associated with a rural local exchange. Next, they will begin driving as much traffic as they can to these numbers. Often times, these numbers are associated with free conference calling services or adult chat lines. As the calls come in, the rural exchange will then charge excessive access charges to the other carriers that terminate the calls to them.
As a communications service provider you may be at risk to traffic pumping. You may be at risk by being connected to an end office that also services one of these companies. Or, you may be at risk by allowing traffic from other carriers to transit your network and terminate to one of these high cost end offices.
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