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Robocalls have harmed consumer trust in answering calls from numbers they don’t know or recognize. In fact, more than 75% of calls from unidentified or unfamiliar numbers go unanswered. To combat this, businesses and their numbers must be vetted, registered, and verified by service providers to help outbound calls be delivered to consumers and displayed appropriately. During ITEXPO panel session, “How Verification is Helping Maintain the Integrity of Voice Calls,” Jonathan Shulman, Vice President of Business Development at iconectiv, and Harold Salters, Technology Consultant at CTIA, will explore the industry initiatives to help preserve trust in voice communications.

This year, consumers will lose $40 billion to fraudulent robocalls. The deluge of illegal robocalls also has conditioned 58 percent of consumers to answer calls only from numbers they recognize. This makes it difficult, expensive and sometimes impossible for hospitals, schools and other legitimate organizations to reach consumers. At a SIPNOC 2022 panel, Rich Call Data (RCD) Best Practices: Building Trust for Future Success, John Haraburda, Principal Solutions Engineer at iconectiv, will explore how RCD is poised to help increase call-answer rates by providing an enhanced caller ID display that includes a company’s name, logo and call intent.

Spam and illegal robocalls have caused consumers to stop answering calls from telephone numbers they don’t recognize. This poses a significant challenge for legitimate businesses trying to reach consumers by telephone with important or timely updates and information. A Registered Caller proof-of-concept trial with Verizon and Metaswitch successfully showed that valid enterprise calls were fully authenticated, shared and broadcasted for optimal call delivery to improve the call answer rate.

STIR/SHAKEN is a now widely-adopted protocol enabling telecoms to feed calling party attestation info to consumers when they receive a call from businesses and organizations of all types and sizes. George Cray, iconectiv Senior Vice President of Product along with an expert from CTIA, sits down with Dan Baker, editor from Black Swan Telecom Journal, to discuss the adoption of initiatives like Registered Caller.

In this era, when more than 70% of people have stopped answering voice calls, legitimate businesses need, want and deserve a way to have consumers know that a call is from a trusted calling party. Consumers want that, too. In a recent Network Media Group panel, experts from CTIA, iconectiv and T-Mobile explain how the Secure Telephone Identity Governance Authority (STI-GA) policy change is helping simplify the verification of voice calls—including toll-free numbers—for all legitimate callers.

Today, the Secure Telephone Identity Governance Authority (STI-GA) announced a new era of STIR/SHAKEN functionality, expanding caller ID authentication reach with the use of delegate certificates and by allowing Resp Orgs to directly join the SHAKEN ecosystem. Registered Caller—the collaborative industry initiative facilitated by CTIA and iconectiv—will operationalize this process by providing a trusted, industry-backed, centralized telephone number registry that service providers and certification authorities can use to verify phone number information.

Lack of caller verification is one of the largest problems that is causing individuals to not answer their phone. If they do not see who is calling them then they are less likely to pick up at all. With calls answered rates reaching the lowest it has ever been in a long time, it is to the upmost importance that proper authentication gets back into phone calls. Executives from CTIA, iconectiv, Metaswitch and Verizon covered a recent trial run of Registered Caller™ at the 2021 STIR/SHAKEN Summit and conversed about what it will offer to fix the declining answered rates.

With the rise of unwanted robocalls, ignored or blocked legitimate calls have a negative impact on U.S. companies and consumers. To solve this challenge, iconectiv in partnership with CTIA created Registered Caller™—the industry-backed centralized registry for verifying voice calls. Registered Caller ensures that business entities and the telephone numbers they use get vetted, registered and verified, helping prevent legitimate calls from getting blocked or flagged as spam. In this Network Media Group panel, experts from AT&T, CTIA and iconectiv explore how this helps maintain the integrity of one of our most vital methods of communication—voice calls—by providing voice service providers with a single source of truth for verified caller information.

A recent announcement of approval for the use of Delegate Certificates from Secure Telephone Identity Governance Authority (STI-GA) revealed that there may be a clearer and more concise path to ending the headache that is robocalls. Delegate Certificates opens the door for newer technologies that can combat robocalls such as Registered Caller™. Businesses that rely on phone calls to consumers, call-answer rates, and customer satisfaction have taken a hit with the ever growing robocall rates. CTIA in partnership iconectiv will continue to work on Registered Caller™ to take down the hinderance of robocalls and get business and phone calls back on track.

T-Mobile has announced a major milestone towards making Caller ID more trusted so consumers only pick up the right calls from unknown numbers. Along with its partners, the company recently completed the first-ever wireless call with Rich Call Data (RCD), which provides more information about an authenticated Caller ID. The information shown includes who is calling, the company branding, and the reason for the call. T-Mobile’s partner firms in this effort include First Orion, CTIA, Everbridge, iconectiv, NetNumber, Numeracle, and Twilio. There’s no timeline available when RCD will arrive commercially. We will be keeping an eye on this development.