Calls From the Wild

Caller ID Doesn't Always Give a Number -- to the Providers' Benefit
Don Oldenburg - Washington Post
May 21, 2006

Unknown, unavailable, out of area, anonymous, private. Clues to some Da Vinci Code mystery? Not exactly, but some experts say this string of words is now widely associated with another mystery. They’re the display messages that appear when Caller ID doesn’t ID the caller.
But, wait a second, why doesn’t Caller ID identify every call and caller?
Good question, says Greg Smith, president and chief executive of Accudata Technologies in Allen, Texas, who thinks consumers who regularly see these terms flash on their Caller ID displays should be asking that of their telephone carriers.
"The caller’s number should always show unless there is some technical difficulty. But the `unknown,’ `unavailable’ and `out of area’ . . . you should never get those," he says. "We all do get them, and the reason we do is we are all getting cheated."
Telephone companies have the technology not only to identify the number in nearly 100 percent of the calls you receive, says Smith, but also to identify the caller’s name -- or at least the name listed on the phone’s account. But how often does that happen? Half the time? Less?
"It is a financial decision some of these telephone carriers make," Smith says of why Caller ID services sometimes don’t deliver.
In the spirit of full disclosure, you should know that Accudata Technologies is one of about 20 line information database (LIDB) companies nationwide in the business of collecting, storing and delivering telephone information -- including providing names and numbers of callers displayed via Caller ID. When a phone company can’t find a caller’s name and number in its database, it has to reach into other phone-info databases, such as Accudata’s, and pay a small fee.
But some phone-service providers are unwilling to dip into the appropriate LIDB to provide the Caller ID info their customers are paying $6 to $8 for each month.
When calls come from outside the service provider’s system, they require going to outside databases to fetch the info. At a penny per look-up, those Caller ID calls would cost a phone company about $1 a month per Caller ID customer.
Chicken feed? Not when you figure that the nation’s three biggest telecommunications companies -- Verizon Communications Inc., BellSouth Corp. and AT&T Inc. -- provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers. The savings for not paying the penny can be millions to tens of millions of dollars each month.
But the telephone companies say there are calls that Caller ID simply can’t identify by name or number. And then there’s the Caller ID spoofing that’s making news lately. Illegal telemarketers, con artists -- anyone -- can change how their phone numbers or names appear on Caller ID using spoofing technology available online. Callers can hide their identities or even make it appear that their calls are coming from your bank or the police.
Smith says the problem is that customers are conditioned to accept spotty Caller ID service as normal, and phone companies aren’t going to go the distance to provide better service unless consumers demand it. He urges consumers to complain to their phone companies and to the Federal Communications Commission if their Caller ID is hit-or-miss. "It requires an educated consumer today, someone who’s willing to say, `Dad-gummit, I’m paying for this.’ You have to at least try."

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