AT&T exec speaks out on traffic pumping

AT&T Vice President of Federal Regulatory Hank Hultquist tapped a literary reference involving Sherlock Holmes recently to illustrate a point about the Federal Communications Commission's policy on traffic pumping. (That's where a company sets up a free inbound phone line in an area with high terminating access charges and splits the charges with a competitive carrier in that area.)

Hultquist notes that the master detective once solved a case by remarking that a dog did not bark when it recognized a particular perpetrator. But the AT&T exec remarks that he isn't sure how to interpret the FCC's silence on traffic pumping. He points out that when the FCC asked some questions about Google's blocking of traffic destined for traffic pumpers, Google narrowed the scope of its call blocking. But as Hultquist notes, Google "has never stopped blocking calls to traffic-pumpers and the FCC has never again barked about this issue."