Communications play a critical role in keeping people connecting, businesses running and commerce flowing. The fact that consumers are less likely to answer their phones is not a new problem, and now the rules are changing on how calls are being delivered through the network with the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN.

People simply do not answer the telephone anymore unless they unequivocally know who is calling. That is hurting legitimate businesses that rely on voice calls to reach their customers. The industry continues to advance the objective to restore consumer faith and confidence in answering our phones. Central to achieving that objective is the ability to verify that the information of the calling party has been authenticated.

5G is an enabler of the digital economy that involves augmenting existing network components with new technology and adding in many more service-ready locations. The benefits of using a common data management infrastructure accelerates 5G rollouts because common attributes agreed to by the industry help minimize the complexities and ensure interoperability.

There are 42M toll-free numbers available today and that continues to grow – especially with the introduction of the new 833 numbers. If managing toll-free numbers was easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It’s extraordinarily complicated and growing more so every day. iconectiv TruReach Toll-Free 8MS is a fully supported, cloud-based platform that integrates into existing customer service operations and ensures the efficient management of toll-free numbers.

In a type of robocall scam known as “wangiri” or one-ring, fraudsters call but hang up after the first ring. When consumers and businesses call back, they don’t realize that it’s a premium telephone number and they are charged a high fee. According to CFCA’s 2019 Fraud Loss Survey, one-ring “wangiri” fraud accounts for more than $1.82B in annual losses.

With the FCC September 28 mandate upon us, many are wondering what that could mean for inbound calls to the United States.

It’s no surprise that spam and illegal robocalls have caused consumers to stop answering their calls. Especially when you consider that more than 6.3 billion spoofed calls were made as of March 2021, according to FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, and the fact that $1.8 billion is lost annually due to fraudulent activities, including “wangiri” one-ring scams.

As part of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) crackdown on illegal robocalls, by June 30, 2021 all U.S. voice service providers must file certifications in the publicly available Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD) to provide detailed information regarding their implementation of the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication framework and/or a robocall mitigation program.

The Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) / Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using tokens (SHAKEN) framework gives phone companies the tools needed to cryptographically sign and verify calling parting information to help mitigate illegal robocalls.