Traffic pumping

Traffic pumping, also known as access stimulation, is a controversial practice by which some local exchange telephone carriers in rural areas of the United States inflate the volume of incoming calls to their networks, and profit from the greatly increased intercarrier compensation fees to which they are entitled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

As of March 2010, traffic pumping is the subject of an ongoing legal and regulatory dispute involving AT&T, Google Voice, rural phone carriers, and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

How it works

Under the regulatory mechanisms of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, wireless, and long distance carriers (such as AT&T, Sprint, T-mobile, or Verizon) pay access fees to local exchange carriers (LECs) for calls to those carriers' local subscribers. Rural carriers are allowed by the FCC to charge substantially higher access fees (as high as 10-20 cents/minute) than carriers in more urban areas, based on the rationale that they must pay for substantial fixed infrastructure costs while handling lower call volume.