Award Consulting – our newest Alliance Partner

“You are who you are by virtue of the company you keep”, T.B. Joshua

The complexities of real-world telecommunication networks and the array of vendors makes them impossible to fully understand all the intricacies.   Fortunately, TelcoBridges has an array of well-versed alliance partners that do have the specialization to solve complex network challenges. Continue reading Award Consulting – our newest Alliance Partner

log4j vulnerability – is it a Risk?

by Alan Percy, CMO @TelcoBridges

Plenty of questions this last week about the log4j vulnerability and whether there is any risk within TelcoBridges ProSBC or Tmedia products.

In summary: TelcoBridges does not use log4j in our products and thus are not vulnerable to intrusion attacks through log4j.

Read on for more details:

Continue reading log4j vulnerability – is it a Risk?

After 8 Years – Price Increases are Coming

by Alan Percy, CMO @TelcoBridges

Tmedia Price TagOne unique attribute of TelcoBridges is that the company has been able to keep the price of Tmedia products stable for over 8 years.   Much of this is the result of long-term agreements with suppliers, operational efficiency, and close management of margins.

Continue reading After 8 Years – Price Increases are Coming

NTCA 2021 Fall Conference

Rural operators are the lifeblood of communications services for communities outside the large metros, serving a diverse subscriber base including farmers, bedroom communities, native American reservations, and more.   Recipients of significant investment in recent stimulus bills, the rural operators are seeing new spending for infrastructure and modernization to bring broadband internet and voice services across America.

TelcoBridges will be participating in this year’s NTCA 2021 Fall Conference and Expo, showing a number of new solutions that are well suited for rural operations, including:

If you are planning to attend the event, be sure to stop at the TelcoBridges booth #19 in the Expo, or book an appointment for a meeting.

Need another reason to stop by?  We’re holding a drawing for a Weber Q 1200 portable grill, perfect for the upcoming tailgating season!   Stop by to enter!

The NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association is building a better broadband future for rural America. Proudly representing nearly 850 independent, family-owned and community-based telecommunications companies, NTCA’s members build and deliver broadband connectivity and operate essential services in rural and small-town communities across the U.S.

More on the event: www.ntca.org/fallconference

Everyone Likes to Complain About Robocalls

Are they willing to do anything about it?

By Alan Percy, CMO @TelcoBridges

Every time I’m in a social setting and I get asked about what I do for a career, the subject of illegal robocalls always dominates the discussion.   “What are you doing to stop them?”

I clearly remember a series of meetings with service providers a few years back, pitching them on solutions to the illegal robocall problem that could be solved with session border controller software.   They could not care less about the problem.   As much as consumers complained to the FCC about the problem, there was little that service providers could or would do about the problem.  They were getting paid to transit the calls and had little motivation to fix the problem.  It was someone else’s problem.

All that changed with the TRACED Act of 2019.

The TRACED act included a number of new tools and mandates:

Caller ID Authentication requiring the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN – this forced originating service providers to attach an Identity Token to the header of the call, with origination traceback information and an Attestation field that indicated whether the call could be trusted.

Call Blocking – prior to the TRACED act, service providers had to pass all traffic, essentially preventing them from screening call and preventing illegal robocalls from being delivered to consumers.  The Act allowed service providers to block suspicious traffic and indemnified them from prosecution for failing to delivering what they felt was a suspicious call.

Scam Call Protection – required the FCC to explore means to prevent One Ring Scams and protect hospitals from illegal calls.

Enforcement – the Act increased penalties, extended statute of limitations and other tools to help find and charge those generating and passing known illegal robocalls.

The first big milestone of the TRACED Act is almost upon us.  Service providers in the US are required to file their Robocall Mitigation Plans with the FCC by June 30th 2021.   The penalty for not filing a plan is having their traffic blocked by other providers after September 28th, 2021.

So all of a sudden, service providers are interested in dealing with illegal robocalls.

We discussed this in more details during a Cloud Communications Alliance webinar titled “Robocall Mitigation Compliance”, explaining the details of filing and impact of not filing a plan.

View the recording here:

Robocall Mitigation for the Contact Center

By Alan Percy, CMO @TelcoBridges

The network manager for a large retail chain (who asked to remain anonymous), came to us with a problem.  His agents at an inbound call center were wasting time answering calls from illegal robocallers and it was costing him dearly.  He was looking for a means to reduce, if not eliminate, the robocalls altogether.  In this case, the contact center was responsible for taking product orders, so the agents valuable time was wasting fielding calls rather than facilitating purchase fulfillment. Continue reading Robocall Mitigation for the Contact Center

New ProSBC 3.1.117 Now Generally Available

New ReleaseIn life, there are only two certainties:

    1. Taxes, and
    2. There is a New Version of Software.

We’re pleased to share the news that FreeSBC and ProSBC now have a new Generally Available version of software:  Release 3.1.117   This version is a culmination of many days of hard work by our development team, adding a number of new features and bug fixes that have been addressed over the last few months.

Continue reading New ProSBC 3.1.117 Now Generally Available