Well, is it possible? Maybe, but it’ll never be done with the old systems. Now, my information is a bit old, but back in about 2003 I helped set up a digital phone switching center for a company that was changing from an ISP to a VOIP carrier. While all I did was the networking stuff (as in plugging in cables and making sure the servers were properly IP’d and routed), I did chat with the VOIP crew about how all this stuff worked. As they explained it, if I’m remembering properly, the role of a VOIP carrier is to offer to move calls with a certain quality and latency, for a certain price, between the endpoints. In that era at least, when you made a call, your cell carrier would want to get that call off their network as soon as possible, and make someone else pay for it. Similarly, the other end’s carrier wants to get the call as close as possible to the end user. This resulted in a market where different carriers would bid for traffic, with the lowest price winning. There are many other variables – which codec, international taxes, how much other traffic is being passed and its price, and so on, but in essence in that first few moments between hitting dial and the first ring, an entire reverse auction takes place between the various carriers servers, and the low price wins but only for a very, very short window. Oh, and the servers don’t get the actual phone numbers (that would be a potential breach of privacy) just a weird account number. If you’re doing research to see if you’re being spoofed, the window will close (it’s just a few hundred milliseconds). But that may be a decade or more out of date.
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