STIR/SHAKEN needs industry-wide support, especially in a Europe lagging behind FCC implementation
Users always hated getting random sales calls.
But they are now starting to really, really hate getting calls that can cost them money.
And unless we come up with a convincing defence that protects them from having their time wasted or their bank accounts drained—they’re just going to stop taking calls.
Period.
Which raises the astonishing prospects of a world where people might barely even use voice as a telecom service—negating all the value of free minutes as a reason to even have a cell phone. Already, voice is on a steep decline, was down 9% in 2017, 4% in 2018, and 6% in 2019, 7% in 2020. And that’s a snowball the sector can ill afford to see getting any bigger.
46 Billion Unwanted Calls a Year is Probably 46 Billion Too Many
Yes, Gen Z hates voice calls, but they’re not the only cohort getting teed-off with people calling them. The reason’s all too clear: spam—which was an issue back with robocalling but has got even worse as the world’s adopted VoIP. The unintended consequence of this is, reported over at Capacity, is that it suddenly became very easy to falsify the A number, which has led to the whole issue of CLI/ calling line identification spoofing.
As the European Commission has noted, “CLI is a persistent problem that has been observed for a long time and is difficult to quantify, [but] may be more frequent in IP-networks and in the case of international calls to bypass termination rates and take advantage of roaming.” (It’s a little ironic that the Commission’s 2013 decision to adopt “roam like at home” rule for mobile services that got rid of all extra calling charges within the European Union and European Economic Area was a huge driver of the problem in the first place, of course.)
The fallout of us all moving to VoIP is more fraud and criminality. The numbers speak for themselves: in February alone, Americans got 3.8 billion robocalls—a rate that could total 46 billion by the end of 2022.
All new tech advances on the web tend to attract bad actors trying to exploit vulnerabilities, and no-one thought up CL as a way to rip off users. Nonetheless, we have ended up with a system that can for the time be fooled by unscrupulous third parties–to everyone’s detriment (Brussels again: “Illegitimate CLI spoofing is to the detriment of all parties, be it end-users, providers, and regulators”).
As stated, telcos didn’t ask for this. But as an industry, we’re the ones that are going to have to fix it. One day, we may have some kind of blockchain or quantum crypto way of stopping people using things like Wangiri to steal money from our grandparents, but we’re not there yet.
But what we do have to start stopping a caller’s genuine CLI being swapped out for a convincing, but fake, call origin call header field is STIR/SHAKEN. Since last year, US and Canadian cell phone carriers have been obliged to use this form of caller ID authentication. Europe’s been behind, but Brussels is catching up.
Now, the commission has mandated local regulators to report back on their assessment of the best measures to mitigate, prevent and/or detect CLI spoofing and spell out the technical, operational, standardisation and cost aspects of the different possible solutions—including STIR/SHAKEN–from the European perspective. Their feedback should “also consider how such solutions could be deployed and managed at the European level”.
Let’s Not Let Voice Become so Degraded No-One Wants it Any More
Some EU members aren’t waiting. France is understood to be set to unveil a STIR/SHAKEN regime (based on a national caller ID database) as early as 12 months from now. And as other major markets will follow, now is clearly the time to get ready for a possible EU and EEA-wide (plus almost certainly, the UK) STIR/SHAKEN-based operating environment.
Learn More
To help, we’ve written a new paper, Get ready for an imminent and European-wide STIR/SHAKEN-based CLI-spoofing regulatory regime, which lays out the context of fraud and both regulatory and social unhappiness with the CLI issue, including technical details of how STIR/SHAKEN works.
It highlights early details of the French State’s approach to making it work for its citizens and also gives you a useful overview of how our expertise and solutions are already helping operators like you get ready for this significant shift in our industry.
The verdict’s clear, it is a call you really do want to take—as it’s from not just a trusted source, it’s really going to help you save voice as a safe communication method… which is probably kind of good for us all long-term, right?
