New Industry Testbed for Stopping Robocalls

The SIP Forum and ATIS have announced a new technology standard, called SHAKEN, that can eliminate robocalls.

Machine-generated telephone calls, or robocalls, are often used for fraud and are destroying the integrity of the telephone network. YouMail, a cloud-based call answering service, estimates that 2.3 billion robocalls were made in December 2016. That is approximately 7.2 calls per telephone user. From personal experience, this estimate is too low. I get over 100 robocalls per month.

The current solutions to block annoying phone calls depend on blacklists of Caller IDs that are known to originate robocalls. However, these solutions are easily circumvented. Spoofing the Caller ID is trivial and robocallers simply change the Caller ID when it gets blacklisted.

The new SHAKEN technology solves this problem by making the Caller ID tamper proof. You will be able to trust the Caller ID on your phone and automatically ignore bogus calls before they ring.

Details of the new technology are publicly available and may be downloaded from ATIS here or from the SIP Forum here.

More significantly, however, ATIS and NeuStar are offering a free robocalling testbed for developers to test their SHAKEN implementations.

“This is important,” says Jim Dalton, founder of TransNexus. “Real resources are being deployed that will speed the development of SHAKEN-based solutions. The SHAKEN technology has two major strengths. First, the new standard enables a highly competitive ecosystem of solutions. Users and telephone companies will have choices for securing Caller ID. Second, a secure Caller ID raises the integrity of the telephone network to a level that will enable new, unimagined applications and transactions.”