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^[update], 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).

Under the regulatory mechanisms of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, wireless, and long distance carriers (such as AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile US, 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 than carriers in more urban areas, based on the rationale that they must pay for substantial fixed infrastructure costs while handling lower call volume.

In order to increase their incoming call volume, and thereby fees owed, rural carriers partner with certain telephone service providers to route their calls through the rural carrier. These services typically include phone sex and conference call providers, which expect a high volume of incoming calls. Notably, these service providers do not need to establish a physical, local presence in order to route their calls in this way. As a consequence of this arrangement, the rural carriers can receive millions of dollars of fees, which they then share with the ostensibly "local" service providers, who are responsible for vastly increasing call volume above typical rural usage.

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