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Friday Means Martinis Both Shaken and Stirred: Need a Drink After All Those Robo Calls?

Earlier this month in Dallas, 40 major service providers along with the FCC and other industry standards bodies attended conference designed to resolve one of the fastest growing problems in the communications industry: annoying robo and nuisance calling.

We’ve all felt it. We’re commuting, we’re in a meeting, we’re at our kid’s soccer match – and there goes our phone, and it’s a random, unwanted and aggravating advertising call.

This new event, hosted by Ribbon Communications, a global provider of secure and intelligent cloud communications, was based on STIR-SHAKEN and attracted 60 people from more than 40 service providers – all of whom are committed to solving for this growing problem.

STIR-SHAKEN is a framework developed by the ATIS/SIP Forum NNI Task Force to reduce the number of illegally spoofed calls.

STIR-SHAKEN use digital certificates, based on common public key cryptography techniques, to ensure the calling number of a telephone call is secure. STIR-SHAKEN will identify Caller ID spoofing, a common technique used by robocallers, by authenticating the Caller ID at the origination point of the call, then validating this Caller ID at the termination point. Operators can use STIR-SHAKEN to determine the validity and intent of a call.

Regulators are increasingly applying pressure to carriers to solve the robocalling problem. In the US, FCC Chairman Pai sent letters to 11 voice providers asking those that had not yet established concrete plans to implement the Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs (SHAKEN) framework and the Secure Telephone Identity Revised (STIR) standards to implement such standards without delay. In Canada, the CRTC has mandated deployment of STIR/SHAKEN by March 2019.

More than half the calls to all mobile phones in the US in 2019 will be robocalls. Addressing this rapidly growing issue is among the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) highest priorities. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has demanded that service providers begin implementing STIR-SHAKEN in 2019.

“It was really impressive to see the high level of interest at the summit from nearly every major service provider in the United States and Canada and their commitment to solving the illegal spoofing problem that nearly all of us are experiencing on a daily basis,” said Dr. Eric Burger, Chief Technology Officer for the FCC. “We look forward to working closely with service providers, vendors and industry standards bodies to mitigate this issue as quickly as possible through initiatives like STIR-SHAKEN.”

“It was a pleasure to be part of Ribbon’s STIR-SHAKEN summit and update attendees about the vital work of the SIP Forum/ATIS NNI Task Force,” said Richard Shockey, Chairman of the SIP Forum. “The STIR-SHAKEN framework was specifically developed to eliminate one of the biggest problems in the communications industry today, and events like the STIR-SHAKEN summit are instrumental in educating industry stakeholders about the STIR-SHAKEN framework and helping them gain the knowledge they need to effectively deploy solutions in their networks.”

“We were pleased with the turnout and positive reactions we received from conference attendees,” said Tony Scarfo, EVP of Products, R&D, Support and Supply Chain for Ribbon. “It really is a true indication of how big a problem this is and how focused the industry is on solving it. We are working closely with our partners and industry agencies to deliver holistic solutions that will directly address the robocalling issue.”

Last month Ribbon announced that its software and appliance-based session border controllers (SBC 5000 Series, SBC 7000 and SBC SWe) and its policy and routing (PSX) solutions had successfully completed interoperability testing to support STIR-SHAKEN. Ribbon is working with industry partners like Neustar on a comprehensive solution that will allow service providers to notify their end-user customers of potential robocalls. The end-users can choose to either answer or ignore the calls. Currently, the end-user does not receive any indication on the validity of the call.

We’ll keep tracking the progress of these initiatives, even as we wish all our readers a truly quiet weekend and happy Friday!

Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.

Edited by Maurice Nagle