ARE MORE TELEMARKETERS/SPAM CALLS SEEM TO BECOMING FROM SMALL TOWNS?

Have you noticed where some of the annoying sales/spam calls that we receive, caller-id shows as coming from a small town within your local calling area? For example, in Colorado, I see some of these calls supposedly originating from towns such as Deckers, Keenesburg, or Georgetown. This leads to a couple of questions:

1. Are these sales calls from people (or dialers) located in these towns?

The answer is most likely NO.

2. Does it then mean that the listed phone number and location are totally bogus?

Surprisingly, the answer is NOT necessarily YES.

To get a better understanding for my answer to Question #2, let’s take a look back at how telephone numbering location assignments have changed over the last few years. For clarity, I would first like to first define 6 telecom terms/acronyms:

• ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier) -- These are the traditional local exchange companies. Think of the ‘Baby Bells’ for example. They run the overall telephone network infrastructure. Part of their service is selling wholesale blocks of telephone numbers to CLECs, and providing the telecom network routing/switching.

• CLEC’s (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) -- These are these 3rd party telecom competitive companies. They provide similar networking services as the ILECs, however, they do not own the backbone telephone network infrastructure. Most CLECs are ‘wholesale’ customers of the ILECs.
• NPA (Numbering Plan Area) – These are also known as Telephone Area Codes. They are the first 3-digits of a 10-digit North American phone Number.
• NXX (‘N’ means digits 2-9, while ‘X’ means digits 0-9) – This is also known as the Telephone Exchange or Prefix. NXX simply means a 3-digit number, that immediately follows the NPA, in which the first digit cannot be a “0” or “1”. Years ago, “NNX” would have been the correct acronym, as the 2nd digit of the phone exchange could not be 0 or 1, but this has changed, allowing NPAs and NXXs to look similar.
• Number Portability – Allows land-line customers to keep the same number if they move to a different part of the city, served by a different Central Office. It also allows you to keep the same number if you switch to a different carrier. For Wireless customers, it allows you to keep the same number, if you move to a totally different part of the US.
• Central Office – The main switching facility for an ILEC geographic area, routing calls for local, long-distance, and wholesale phone services.

The telemarketers/spammers, are commonly customers of CLECs. Examples of CLEC companies include; Bandwidth.com, Onvoy/Sinch, and Telnyx. It should be stressed that these companies also have many legitimate customers, not just the sale spammers. These spammers commonly use ‘war dialers’, which automatically places calls to large blocks of telephone numbers, and when a call is answered, the call is then routed to a call center person, somewhere in the world. The use of war-dialers has also been a big problem for people with ‘fax to e-mail’ service. Companies who provide this service typically have large blocks of similar numbers. When a call is made to the fax server, the dialer is smart enough to know that it is a fax machine, and transmits an electronic advertisement (i.e., vacation trip promotion), which is then received by every fax customer as an e-mail, creating e-mail spam.

Some years ago, if a CLEC wanted to purchase a block of phone numbers, they would need to buy a complete NXX (10,000 numbers) whether they needed that many numbers or not. If not needed, this would be a big waste of numbers. The NXX is assigned to a Central Office, for a particular location (i.e., part of a city). If the CLEC wanted numbers for an entire city, they would buy NXX’s for each Central Office, within that city, and any suburbs.

With an ever growing list of CLECs along with a growing list of Cell Phone Companies, more and more available NXX’s were getting eaten up, requiring the addition of more and more new NPA’s.

To help lessen the demand for new NPAs, a couple of major changes within the telephone network infrastructure were made.

1. Providing “Number Portability”, which in this case meant the CLEC no longer has to buy an NXX in every Central Office to obtain phone numbers to cover all parts of a city / local calling area.
2. The second change, instead of routing telephone numbers based on the first 6 digits NPA + NXX, the routing is now based on the first 7 digits (NPA + NXX + 1st number of the Suffix). What this basically means is that the CLEC no longer has to buy a full 10,000 number NXX, but can purchase 1000 number blocks, not wasting numbers.

A good example of this is in Georgetown Colorado. Originally, any number that began with 303-569-XXXX were for a CenturyLink (Qwest) ILEC customer, located in Georgetown. The problem with this, is that Georgetown is a small town (population 1300) and would never fill up the entire NXX, creating a waste of available numbers. Now, the entire exchange is no longer reserved for Century Link (Qwest) customers living in Georgetown. For these existing Century Link (Qwest) customers, the assigned numbers begin with:

303-569-1XXX, 303-569-2XXX, 303-569-3XXX, 303-569-4XXX, 303-569-5XXX

This allowed for 303-569-6XXX thru 303-569-9XXX to be available for CLECs or Cell Phone companies. Below, is a database screen shot for the current 303-569 number block assignments:

Does the CLEC customer need to be in Georgetown to get one of these numbers --NO, because of number portability. This resulted in most of 303-569 numbers now being assigned.

Looking at the same database, there are now 13 NXX’s assigned to Georgetown.

You might ask why Georgetown has so many NXXs for a small town? As demand continues to add new phone numbers for CLECs and Cell Phone companies, the new NXXs can be assigned to any Central Office within the local calling area for the particular city. Since the central offices for these smaller towns have the least telecom traffic and most available capacity, new NXXs are being assigned to them.

In summary, this is why we are seeing more and more Spam sales calls appearing from these smaller towns. YES, it is legit to see these towns listed on the caller IDs, even though the actual caller is not located there.

Reference: The Local Calling Guide Database (https://www.localcallingguide.com/lca_prefix.php), Sponsored by “LES.NET” (CLEC Company).