TADSummit is the thought-leadership event in programmable communications / telecoms for over ten years.

We deliver the truth, no BS. Truth you can build your business on. We’re able to do that because many of our presenters are small and medium businesses. If they are wrong, their business ceases to exist.

I’ve noticed a movement in the echochamber of the industry, rather than ignoring us, the framing is exposing the truth is labelled as “being negative”. That is a lie. Change is only possible by understanding the current situation. Exposing the truth is the most positive and customer focused thing we can do. Ignoring the theft of $60M from Twitter for close to 2 years is the most negative thing the industry can do.

It’s about time the industry got behind TADSummit’s focus on honesty.

Here is the full TADSummit agenda.

Here are some previous podcasts with Daniel

• Podcast 24: TADSummit Innovators, Dan Gill, Augnet
• Podcast 93: Truth in Telecoms, AIT, Kevin Graham and Daniel Gill
• Podcast 94: Truth in Telecoms, What to do about AIT, Kevin Graham and Daniel Gill

To quote Peter Drucker, “you cannot manage what you cannot measure.” That is the problem with SMS, for 30+ years across the providers and the customers (brands). And is leading to some brands moving away from SMS.

As you’ll learn in Daniel’s session, AIT is customer theft. Elon Musk complained nearly 2 years ago about $60M Twitter was losing per year from AIT by what he labelled as telcos. Twitter is just one brand, there are thousands of them, including banks, financial services, web brands, consumer services, etc. Billions is being stolen from customers (brands) using AIT.

The discussion between Daniel and Scott Warner is the reason I start with this TADSummit presentation. You can hear how engaged Scott is as he learns about the extent and risks of AIT. Not only to corporate theft, but consumer theft.

The origin for Augnet came from the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft and they asked simple management questions on the $250M telecoms spend. And for SMS they simply had no measurements, other than price. Back to the earlier Peter Drucker quote.

The bigger the SMS customer, the more they need to measure the SMS channel, and the governance problem remains. Also the bigger the SMS customer, the more shady practices are required to make money, given the price pressure of such large purchases.

At this point aggregators blame the brands for making them steal from their customers. This is a bogus argument. The industry has made itself hooked on shady practices to win business. Stealing is never OK.

AIT is now endemic in the industry, given the lack of response to Twitter’s accusation of theft. The conversion ratio for the AIT is 100%, and the margin in 100% as the traffic is dumped. Hence brands see great conversion ratios, but they are fake. And the dumped traffic means the actual cost for real traffic is higher.

Daniel highlights that AIT is not just about stealing from your corporate customers, it’s also enables consumer fraud. The AIT fraudster also has access to genuine customer data, like OTP SMS. That can be exposed on the dark web, and sold to another fraudster. That customer data can be used to get access to the consumers credit card details, and potentially thousands of Euros of fraud. Yes, that’s a massive GDPR violation.

I see many CPaaS companies making claims in restoring trust. Before trust, honesty comes first. Without governance, honesty can not be confirmed.

We cover much in this session, highlighting that codes of conduct are pointless as there is no governance. Here is Kevin Graham explaining why he could not sign MEF code of conduct as he had gray traffic, like others who signed it.

Scott Warner joins the conversation at around 13:30, it’s well worth listening from that point onwards.

To restore trust, the industry must be honest, come clean on AIT, and remove it by adopting Augnet. SMS needs governance.