Acceptable Use Policy

1. Purpose and scope

This Acceptable Use Policy (the “AUP”) governs all use of the voice origination, termination, telephone numbering, call tracking and related communications services (the “Services”) provided by CarrierLinkTel (“CarrierLinkTel”, “we”, “us” or “our”). It is incorporated by reference into, and forms part of, the Terms & Conditions and any master service agreement, order form or rate schedule between you and CarrierLinkTel.

Our network carries business conversations. That is a deliberate commercial and engineering choice. Automated dialing and short-duration traffic degrade answer rates, attract carrier-level blocking and analytics labelling, and damage delivery for every other customer sharing the route. By excluding that traffic entirely, we protect the call completion rates and caller reputation of the enterprises that rely on us.

If any provision of this AUP conflicts with a negotiated agreement you have signed with us, the negotiated agreement controls only to the extent it is expressly more permissive and is signed by an authorised officer of CarrierLinkTel. Silence or non-enforcement is never a waiver.

2. Who this policy applies to

This AUP applies to:

• the customer that contracts with us (the “Customer” or “you”);
• every employee, contractor, agent and affiliate of the Customer who uses the Services;
• every end user, tenant, sub-account, reseller customer or downstream carrier whose traffic the Customer delivers to our network; and
• any person who accesses the Services using the Customer’s credentials, IP authentication, SIP trunk or API keys, whether or not authorised by the Customer.

You are fully responsible for all traffic presented to our network under your account, including traffic you did not originate. Reselling the Services does not transfer your responsibility — it adds to it. If you resell, you must contractually bind your customers to terms at least as strict as this AUP and must be able to identify the true originator of any call on request.

3. Permitted traffic

The Services are provided for legitimate business communications between an enterprise and parties that expect to hear from it. Permitted traffic includes:

• Inbound customer conversations — calls placed by customers, patients, applicants, policyholders or the general public to numbers you have provisioned with us.
• Human-initiated outbound calls — calls dialled by, or immediately connected to, a live agent who is present and ready to speak at the moment the called party answers.
• Transactional and relationship calls — appointment confirmations, service and delivery notifications, account servicing, support callbacks, and similar calls to parties with an established business relationship, where placed in compliance with applicable law.
• Contact centre operations — high-concurrency inbound and blended conversational voice for enterprise customer experience teams.
• Call tracking — measurement and attribution of genuine inbound conversations generated by your marketing.
• Internal enterprise voice — PBX, UCaaS and site-to-site voice for your own organisation.

If you are unsure whether a campaign fits within this section, ask us in writing at legal@carrierlinktel.com before you send it. We answer traffic profile questions quickly, and we would far rather scope a campaign with you in advance than suspend it mid-flight.

4. Prohibited traffic and conduct

The following are strictly prohibited on the CarrierLinkTel network. This list is illustrative, not exhaustive; conduct that is not listed may still violate this AUP.

4.1 Automated dialing

• Predictive dialers, power dialers, progressive dialers, ratio dialers and any other system that places calls faster than agents are available to take them.
• Automatic telephone dialing systems (ATDS) and any equipment with the capacity to store or produce telephone numbers using a random or sequential number generator.
• Dialing platforms that generate abandoned calls, dead air, or a delay between answer and agent connection.
• Prerecorded or artificial-voice messages, voice broadcasting, ringless voicemail drops and soundboard or “avatar” agent technology, except where you hold documented prior express written consent and have obtained our prior written approval.

4.2 Short-duration and low-quality traffic

• Traffic engineered around very short call durations, including scanning, pinging, number validation, line-type testing, voicemail detection sweeps and answering-machine detection at scale.
• Campaigns whose average call duration or answer-seizure ratio falls outside the thresholds in Section 5.
• Sequential or random dialing of number ranges, and any dialing from unverified or purchased lists.
• “Wangiri” (one-ring) and missed-call-marketing traffic.

4.3 Unlawful and unwanted calling

• Unlawful robocalls and any call that violates the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), the Truth in Caller ID Act, the TRACED Act, FCC regulations, or any applicable state telemarketing, consent or recording statute.
• Calls to numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry, on any applicable state do-not-call list, or on your own internal do-not-call list, absent a valid exemption.
• Calls placed outside permitted calling hours in the called party’s time zone.
• Unsolicited telemarketing, cold-call lead generation, and traffic generated from lead brokers, co-registration paths or “consent farms”.
• Calls that harass, threaten, defraud, deceive or impersonate; charity, debt-relief, extended vehicle warranty, tech-support, imposter and similar high-risk fraud typologies.
• Calls promoting illegal goods or services, or content that is obscene, defamatory, or infringes the intellectual property or privacy rights of others.

4.4 Network and routing abuse

• Access stimulation and traffic pumping, including any arrangement whose purpose is to inflate terminating access minutes for revenue share.
• Call looping, refiling, re-origination and any routing intended to disguise the true origin, jurisdiction or rating of a call.
• Misrepresenting call jurisdiction, ANI, LRN, charge number, or the intrastate/interstate character of traffic to obtain a lower rate.
• Delivering international traffic across a domestic-only route or product.

5. Traffic quality standards

We monitor traffic quality continuously at the account, trunk and campaign level. The following are our standing thresholds for conversational traffic. They are operational guidance, not a service commitment to you, and we may apply stricter thresholds to a specific route, destination or account.

Where metrics fall outside these ranges, we will normally contact your designated technical and compliance contacts to review the campaign. Where the pattern indicates prohibited traffic, or where consumer harm or regulatory exposure is likely, we may act immediately under Section 13 without prior notice.

6. Caller identification and STIR/SHAKEN

Every call you present to us must carry accurate, dialable calling party information. Specifically, you must ensure that:

• the calling number is a number you have the right to use, is in service, and is capable of receiving return calls from the called party;
• the calling number accurately identifies the party on whose behalf the call is placed, and is not chosen to mislead the recipient as to the caller’s identity, location or affiliation;
• you do not rotate, cycle, snowshoe or “burn” calling numbers to evade blocking, analytics labelling or consumer recognition;
• you do not transmit invalid, unallocated, unassigned, sequential or randomly generated ANI; and
• you do not spoof caller ID with intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value, which is prohibited by the Truth in Caller ID Act.

CarrierLinkTel signs outbound calls under the STIR/SHAKEN framework and participates in the industry traceback process. We assign attestation based on our verified knowledge of the customer and of that customer’s right to use the calling number. You must supply the number-ownership evidence we request in order to receive Full (A-level) attestation. Presenting numbers you do not control, or supplying false ownership evidence, is a material breach of this AUP.

7. Consent, Do-Not-Call and TCPA obligations

You are solely responsible for the legality of the calls you place. You represent and warrant, on a continuing basis and for every call, that:

• you hold the level of consent that applicable law requires for that call type — including prior express written consent where the call is a telemarketing call made with an autodialer or prerecorded voice;
• consent was obtained directly from the called party, is specific to your business by name, is not purchased or inferred from a third-party list or lead broker, and is evidenced by records you retain for at least the applicable limitations period;
• you scrub against the National Do Not Call Registry and all applicable state and internal do-not-call lists at an interval no longer than 31 days;
• you honour revocation of consent and do-not-call requests promptly, through any reasonable method the called party uses, and across all of your systems and vendors;
• you comply with all applicable call recording and monitoring consent laws, including all-party consent statutes in the states where you record; and
• you maintain an accurate internal do-not-call policy and train your personnel on it.

We may require you to produce consent records, call scripts, lead sources or scrub logs for any campaign. Failure to produce them promptly is, by itself, grounds for suspension.

8. Telephone number use

Telephone numbers assigned to you through the Services are assigned, not sold. You obtain no ownership interest in any number. You must not:

• acquire numbers in volumes disproportionate to your genuine communications requirements, or warehouse, hoard or stockpile numbers;
• broker, resell, rent or transfer numbers to third parties without our prior written consent;
• use numbers in a manner inconsistent with the geographic area, rate centre or service type for which they were assigned;
• use toll-free numbers in violation of FCC toll-free rules, or attempt to obtain toll-free numbers for warehousing or brokering; or
• use a number in a way that violates number conservation rules or the North American Numbering Plan.

We may reclaim numbers that are unused, that are used in breach of this AUP, that are the subject of regulatory or law-enforcement action, or that are required to be reclaimed by a regulator or the numbering administrator. Porting requests are handled under industry porting rules and require that your account be in good standing.

9. Fraud, toll fraud and revenue share abuse

You must secure your endpoints, SIP credentials, PBX systems and API keys against compromise. You are responsible for all charges incurred through your account, including charges arising from fraud or unauthorised access, except to the extent caused by our own proven failure.

The following are prohibited:

• International revenue share fraud (IRSF) and traffic to artificially inflated premium-rate destinations;
• PBX hacking, SIP brute-force and credential-stuffing attacks, whether inbound or outbound;
• subscription fraud, identity misrepresentation, or providing false information during onboarding;
• use of the Services in connection with any scheme to defraud consumers, businesses or carriers; and
• chargeback abuse, or the use of stolen or unauthorised payment instruments.

We operate automated fraud controls including destination blocking, velocity limits, concurrency caps and spend thresholds. We may apply or tighten these controls without notice where fraud is suspected. Notify us immediately at support@carrierlinktel.com and by telephone on +1 (803) 721-4438 if you suspect your account or equipment has been compromised.

10. Network security and integrity

You must not use the Services to:

• gain or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any network, system, account or data;
• conduct port scanning, vulnerability scanning or penetration testing against our infrastructure without our prior written authorisation;
• launch or participate in denial-of-service, amplification, flooding or registration-flood attacks, including telephony denial-of-service (TDoS);
• distribute malware, or use the Services in connection with command-and-control infrastructure;
• interfere with, degrade or impose an unreasonable load on our network, or circumvent any rate limit, filter, block or usage restriction we apply; or
• resell or expose the Services in a way that permits anonymous or unauthenticated third-party origination.

11. Know Your Customer and downstream diligence

All CarrierLinkTel customers are onboarded under a Know Your Customer review. As a condition of service you must provide, and keep current, the information we reasonably request, which may include legal entity name and registration details, physical business address, ownership and control information, an authorised signatory, a named compliance contact, a description of your business and use case, expected traffic profile and destinations, and evidence of your right to use the calling numbers you intend to present.

If you deliver traffic on behalf of others, you must perform equivalent diligence on each downstream customer, retain those records, bind each downstream customer to terms at least as strict as this AUP, and be able to identify the true originator of any call within the timeframes required by the industry traceback process. We may decline to accept traffic from any downstream entity at our discretion.

Providing false, incomplete or misleading onboarding information is a material breach and permits immediate termination without refund.

12. Monitoring, tracebacks and cooperation

We monitor call detail records, signalling data and aggregate traffic patterns for network management, billing, fraud prevention and compliance purposes. We do not listen to or record the content of your calls except where you have expressly enabled a recording feature, or where we are legally compelled. How we handle the data we do process is described in our Privacy Policy.

You must cooperate fully and promptly with:

• traceback requests from the Industry Traceback Group or any successor consortium;
• enquiries from the FCC, FTC, state attorneys general, or other regulators and law enforcement; and
• our own investigations into traffic on your account.

Traceback responses are expected within 24 hours of our request, and sooner where the request is marked urgent. Failure to respond is treated as a material breach, because an unanswered traceback exposes CarrierLinkTel to direct regulatory liability.

13. Enforcement and suspension

Where we believe this AUP has been or is likely to be violated, we may take any one or more of the following actions, in any order, and with or without prior notice depending on severity:

1. contact your technical or compliance contacts to review the traffic;
2. require you to produce consent records, lead sources, scripts or KYC evidence;
3. apply rate limits, concurrency caps, destination blocks or campaign-level filtering;
4. reduce or withdraw STIR/SHAKEN attestation level;
5. suspend affected trunks, numbers, sub-accounts or the account as a whole;
6. reclaim telephone numbers;
7. terminate the agreement for material breach; and
8. report the matter to regulators, law enforcement, upstream carriers or the traceback consortium.

We will normally provide notice and an opportunity to cure where the issue is technical or inadvertent. We will act immediately and without notice where traffic presents a risk of consumer harm, fraud, regulatory action, or degradation to our network or other customers. Suspension for breach does not relieve you of payment obligations for the remainder of your term, and we are not liable for any loss arising from enforcement action properly taken under this AUP.

14. Customer liability and indemnification

You are liable for, and will indemnify, defend and hold harmless CarrierLinkTel and its officers, employees, affiliates and upstream carriers against, all claims, penalties, fines, forfeitures, settlements, damages, costs and reasonable legal fees arising from or relating to:

• your breach of this AUP;
• traffic presented to our network under your account, including traffic of your downstream customers;
• any claim that a call placed using the Services violated the TCPA, TSR, Truth in Caller ID Act, state telemarketing or recording law, or any other applicable law; and
• any regulatory enquiry, traceback, forfeiture or enforcement action directed at CarrierLinkTel because of your traffic.

Where traffic on your account causes us to incur charges, fines, blocking remediation costs or upstream penalties, those amounts are payable by you on demand.

15. Reporting abuse

If you have received a call you believe originated on the CarrierLinkTel network and violated this policy, we want to hear about it, and we investigate every report.

Email legal@carrierlinktel.com with the subject line “AUP Abuse Report”, and include as much of the following as you have:

• the number that was called and the number that appeared on caller ID;
• the date and time of the call, including your time zone;
• the approximate duration of the call and what was said or played;
• any company, product or callback number mentioned; and
• whether you had any prior relationship with the caller.

We acknowledge abuse reports within one business day. Regulators, carriers and members of the industry traceback process may also reach us at the same address and should mark their request urgent.

16. Changes to this policy

We may update this AUP to reflect changes in law, regulation, industry practice or our services. The effective date at the top of this page always shows the current version. Where a change materially reduces your permitted use, we will give at least thirty (30) days’ notice to your designated account contact, except where a shorter period is required to comply with law or to address an urgent security, fraud or regulatory risk. Your continued use of the Services after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

17. How to contact us

Questions about this policy, campaign pre-approval requests, traceback correspondence and abuse reports should be directed to:

• Legal & compliance: legal@carrierlinktel.com
• Technical support and fraud: support@carrierlinktel.com
• General enquiries: info@carrierlinktel.com
• Telephone: +1 (803) 721-4438
• Address: CarrierLinkTel, 223 W White St, Rock Hill, SC 29730, United States