FCC Told Challenges Remain on Technology to Fight Robocalls

“There is no silver bullet,” Pai said: “We think a big part of the solution is establishing a caller I.D. authentication framework.” Industry needs to act to reestablish trust in networks, he said. According to one estimate, U.S. consumers receive 145 million robocalls per day, Pai said. “I myself got one on the way into work this morning,” he joked: “Amazing how many free Marriott vacations I've won. I'm a very lucky person.”

“Given what I heard today, I am optimistic that the major voice service providers will meet the end-of-2019 deadline for implementation I set for them,” Pai said after the summit.

Panelists agree robocalls are a huge problem requiring prompt implementation of Shaken/Stir. Scammers “steal literally billions of dollars every year from consumers and their No. 1 way of reaching us is by telephone,” said Kathy Stokes, AARP director-fraud prevention programs. She told of an 81-year-old woman who lost $80,000 in an IRS scam. Unless all providers are doing this, “it's all for naught,” Stokes said: “We would be very concerned about making sure that all players are at the table.”

“Consumers are our concern” and that’s why it wants to implement Shaken/Stir and other technology, said Clark Whitten, Cox principal engineer. Trust in the network is at risk, he said: “When you get a call, you’re not sure whether or not you should answer it and may default to not answering.” Fraud prevention is also important, Whitten said. “There’s a good amount of money being lost to the bad actors,” he said.

Fight Escalates

"Intelligent adversaries actively trying to fight back against companies like Hiya who attempt to detect and block them,” said Jonathan Nelson, director-product management. “They will be reacting to Stir/Shaken. We are already starting to see these trends.” Shaken/Stir “is not going to address all the illegal calls,” Nelson said: With “some of the most dangerous illegal calls … no one realizes it was illegal in the first place, you get a call from the charity, they’re collecting donations using a credit card. ... You have no idea that wasn’t a charity and your money was just stolen. They don't have to spoof because they don't worry about traceback and no one will catch them."

"There are still issues that we have to address," said Hala Mowafy, Ericsson senior business consultant. Shaken/Stir "is not going be broadly adopted overnight -- you still have [time-division multiplexing] carriers out there," she said: "There's no industry consensus on what we should display" and other technical issues.

Major players reported progress. “It is very encouraging to hear that we're all on the same page,” said Wireline Bureau Chief Kris Monteith: “We want to tackle this problem. We want to make it better for consumers and restore trust in our communication systems.”

Starting last year, “we were network ready, fully deployed, just waiting for someone to test, or to launch with us,” said Kathleen Foster, T-Mobile core networks engineering director. “We're in various stages of testing with several panelists.” T-Mobile started working with Comcast first and is adding to the number of customers covered, she said. In January, it offered its first device that supports Shaken, she said: “As we get through our testing with the rest of the carriers, we plan to launch more devices and more partners throughout the year.”

Verizon has deployed the capabilities for Shaken/Stir on its secure cloud platform “so that we are ready across our infrastructure,” said Jeff Haltom, senior manager-headquarters planning. The carrier upgraded its network and is “engaging with everyone on the panel and more,” he said.

Verizon’s “legitimate” business customers all want the same thing, Haltom said. “Every one of them is saying, ‘How do I participate, how can I make sure my calls have the highest probability of being answered,’” he said. “That’s a good problem to have. You’re not fighting upstream.” Just saying one complies with Stir/Shaken isn’t enough, he said: “Doing that hard work … of making sure that you can do so with the highest level of attestation, that’s the conversation that we’re leaning into.”

All of the consumer VoIP calls originating on AT&T's network are authenticated now, said Linda Vandeloop, assistant vice president-external and regulatory affairs. “We expect that nearly all of our calls by the end of the year … originating on our IP networks, will be authenticated,” including FirstNet and prepaid, she said. “We are exchanging traffic with one other service provider and we'll be exchanging signed traffic with another second service provider by next month,” she said: “We're testing with a third service provider and preparing to test with others as they become ready to do the testing.”

“It's a very important topic for our consumers” and Vonage is working toward a goal of implementing Shaken/Stir by year-end, said Alexander Eatedali, director-engineering, core network and voice.

Rural Concerns

A panel of smaller providers weighed in.

“What is the vendor community that supports companies such as mine?” asked Denny Law, general manager of Golden West Telecommunications. “What are the product-suites of services, upgrades that are going to be necessary to my platform to technologically implement it?” Rural areas don't have a lot of IP interconnection and rules for those connections are critical, he said.

Brian Ford, NTCA director-industry affairs, said the needed changes may cost under $1 million, according to vendors, which isn’t much to big carriers. “To a company where they have to figure out how to recover that from 3,500 customers, or not recover that, that's a heck of a lot of money,” he said. TDM-based providers face particular problems, Ford said. IP interconnection “is an issue that every single one of my members will face,” he said.

The technology will mean his company has to make fundamental changes to its network, said David Frigen, Wabash Communications chief operating officer: “That will be a big undertaking.” NTCA has 800 members and each will have to make decisions on how they’ll make those changes, he said. Small carriers are waiting for standards to be finalized, Frigen said: “Once that happens … the smalls will have a platform to look at and be able to jump on board.”

Smaller providers don’t have a lot of staffers who can be dedicated to making Shaken/Stir work, said Joe Weeden, vice president-product management at technology vendor Metaswitch. “They need it to be low cost,” he said. “They need it to be incredibly easy to roll out” with no major changes to networks, he said: “It also has to be a complete solution.”

Monteith was encouraged by that panel. “Smaller providers want to participate,” she said. "They want to be part of the solution. There may be some workarounds.”

Summit Notebook

AT&T and other providers responded to a June letter by Commissioner Geoffrey Starks seeking details on their plans to offer free, default call blocking services to consumers aimed at curbing “disruptive and dangerous robocalls.” Starks sent letters to 14 providers, asking for responses by Wednesday (see 1906100025), and those that answered report that consumers aren’t having to pay for new technology. “AT&T was the first voice provider to offer a branded, in-network call blocking and labeling tool -- AT&T Call Protect -- at no charge,” AT&T noted, posted Thursday in docket 17-59: “Nearly three years later, AT&T Call Protect is now a suite of services.” The service has blocked or labeled nearly 600 million suspected fraud calls and more than 1.4 billion suspected spam calls, the carrier said. That’s “in addition to more than 5 billion suspected illegal calls blocked by our global fraud team,” it said. Comcast said it’s “dedicated to combatting the scourge of illegal and fraudulent robocalls and empowering its customers with free robocall mitigation tools and technologies.” Charter said “in addition to rolling out the SHAKEN/STIR framework, Charter already offers its customers a broad range of tools for call blocking, screening, and identification, all of which are free to subscribers.” The MVPD is “rolling out free access to Nomorobo,” an antirobocall service. The cable operator also “continues to provide other call blocking features for its customers, such as Anonymous Call Rejection ... and Selective Call Rejection, which allows customers to create a personal ‘blacklist’ of telephone numbers that will be blocked or rejected,” it said: “Both are standard features included with Cox’s currently marketed voice bundles.”

Google told Starks it agrees call-blocking tools should be free: “Google is already at the forefront in providing millions of consumers with effective call authentication and blocking tools at no cost today.” Vonage said it will implement Shaken/Stir this year and take other steps. “We are still evaluating proposals for blocking tools, including the costs Vonage would be required to pay to vendors and any internal investments Vonage would need to make,” it said: “However, our current expectation is that Vonage will absorb these costs for residential customers.” Bandwidth said as an IP-based provider it's “not typically positioned to offer consumer-oriented tools directly to end users itself, but is rather working to structure its underlying services in a manner that allow its customers the flexibility to deploy effective consumer-oriented solutions designed to avoid the receipt of illegal robocalls.” The company promised to “implement the most robust call authentication framework possible while also working diligently every day to stop the transmission of illegal robocalling on its network holistically.”

The House Commerce Committee is eyeing a potential markup of the compromise Stopping Bad Robocalls Act (HR-3375) during the second half of July, House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle, D-Pa., told us Wednesday. “I think we want to get it done before we break” for the planned five-week August recess, “but I don't think they've set” a definite date for a markup yet, he said. House Communications advanced the measure in June (see 1906250071). House Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone, D-N.J., repeatedly said he aims to advance HR-3375 out of the committee by the end of July (see 1907010061).

T-Mobile has blocked 3.5 billion scam calls and warned customers of about 15 billion “Scam Likely” since launching its free Scam ID and Scam Block in March 2017, it said Thursday. T-Mobile warned of “about one billion ‘Scam Likely’ calls a month -- or 23,000 every minute.”