Sponsor's Message

Answer: Because it's really cheap to send out millions of emails -- so even if the vast majority of them go unread or unanswered, there's still the potential to make a huge profit.

Have you heard of telemarketing?

It's just like spam except it uses calls over voice lines instead of email to deliver an unsolicited commercial sales-pitch.

Here in NZ telemarketing isn't too much of a problem -- although it does exist and it is intensely annoying since most calls seem to come just when you're sitting down to have dinner.

In the USA and many other countries however, telemarketing is a very big thing and almost as much of a plague as the evil email spam.

But what happens when all those US-based telemarketers discover VOIP and realise that they can pitch their products (and scams) directly into affluent first-world countries like New Zealand for just a few cents per call?

Yes, you guessed it -- we will suddenly find ourselves deluged with telemarketing calls, just like our American cousins.

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination.

But the situation could be even worse here than it is in the USA.

That's because the Americans have a National Do Not Call Registry which you can sign up to and thereby have your number removed from the lists of bonafide telemarketers.

This registry however, only applies to US phone numbers so a US-based telemarketer would be under no obligation to remove numbers it was annoying if those numbers were outside the USA itself.

The really worrying thing about this is that if telemarketers discover VOIP and decide to make heavy use of it to pitch there wares across national borders then it could cripple the entire VOIP concept.

Why?

Well, if the majority of VOIP traffic turns out to be spam then it is very easy to see that encumbent telcos (those most threatened by the rise in VOIP popularity) will use these levels of spam to simply block VOIP calls from entering their PSTN.

If/when this happens, services like Skype will suddenly find themselves unable to provide phone-to-phone or net-to-phone connections in many countries.

Spammers have already severely compromised the value of email as a useful communications tool, let's hope that they don't also screw up the potential offered by VOIP.

What say you? Do you get pestered by telemarketers? Do you find telemarketing calls even more annoying than spam?

If off-shore telemarketers began to target NZ residents using VOIP straight to your phone would you support blocking all VOIP calls into NZ?

Have your say on today's column

If you feel that this is a good thing and/or you hold a "geniune affection" for yours truly -- then you are welcome to gift me some money using the buttons provided. In gifting this money you accept that no goods, service or other consideration is offered, provided, accepted or anticipated in return. Just click on the button to gift whatever you can afford. NOTE: PayPal bills in US dollars so don't accidentally gift more than what you were intending :-)

Contacting Aardvark
I'm always happy to hear from readers, whether they're delivering brickbats, bouquets or news tip-offs. If you'd like to contact me directly, please this form. If you're happy for me to republish your comments then please be sure and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!