Google told the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday that it has developed an engineering work-around that allows it to switch off selected telephone numbers to prevent Google Voice users from calling adult chat lines and other high-cost “traffic-pumping” services. The search giant noted that such services disproportionately raise Google’s operating costs for the free service, which is currently available by invitation only.
“We went to work on this fix because earlier this year, we noticed an extremely high number of calls were being made to an extremely small number of destinations,” said Google Counsel Richard Whitt. “In fact, the top 10 telephone prefixes — the area code plus the first three digits of a seven-digit number — generated more than 160 times the expected traffic volumes.”
Under 100 Numbers Blocked
Google Voice provides users with a single telephone number for managing all inbound calls to the user’s wireline and/or wireless telephone numbers and devices. The fledgling service also enables users to forward incoming calls to selected phones, receive SMS messages, and have incoming voice-mail messages automatically converted to text.
To avoid traffic-pumping schemes, Google Voice initially restricted calls to certain telephone prefixes. “But over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at ways to do this on a more granular level,” Whitt said.
Google Voice currently restricts calls to fewer than 100 specific phone numbers, all of which Google says it has good reason to believe are engaged in traffic pumping. According to Whitt, many of these businesses are located in rural areas with local carriers that charge unusually high rates for terminating traffic.
Previously, about 1.1 percent of the monthly traffic through Google Voice accounted for 26.2 percent of the free service’s monthly U.S. cost, Whitt noted. “So in August 2009 Google Voice began the practice of restricting calls to certain…