Not necessarily content with how quickly mobile phone carriers are implementing call authentication technology, the Federal Communications Commission is “actively” prepping regulation that would “make it happen,” according to agency Chairman Ajit Pai, who made the remark during a speech at an anti-robocall conference in Massachusetts yesterday.
Known as SHAKEN/STIR, the initiative seeks to add a checkmark or some other visual notification to an outgoing caller ID to show the recipient of the call that the identity of the entity making the call has been verified. Carriers have been told that they must adopt the SHAKEN/STIR framework by the end of the year, but not many have announced they will be ready to meet that deadline.
“I’ve generally been pleased by the progress reports on SHAKEN/STIR implementation,” Pai said at the Robocall Symposium of the New England States in Roxbury, Mass.. “I’m grateful for the efforts carriers have made to date, and I saw that just this morning, and the completion of the first call. But the reality is we are only seven weeks away from the end-of-the-year deadline, and we are not yet seeing sufficient implementation by all major voice providers. To any carriers out there who might not be treating this deadline with the urgency it deserves, I am putting them on notice now: at my direction, Commission staff is actively working on developing regulations to make this happen. If industry doesn’t get the job done on time, I will not hesitate to call an FCC vote on these new rules.”
The easy part for carriers is authenticating a calling party when dealing with calls where both the calling party and the called party are on the same network. The remaining work must be done on calls where the parties are not on the same network — such as someone with AT&T calling someone with T-Mobile.
