Q. What market conditions are driving the industry’s focus on restoring trust to the PSTN?
Doug: Fraudulent use of the public phone network is the root cause but, in the US the industry focus is being driven entirely by a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandate. It’s an excellent example of how a government agency can help a large industry to make improvements by setting and enforcing a policy. Michael: The FCC mandate is necessary because consumers have completely lost faith in the public telephone network (PSTN). A recent study shows that more than 88% of respondents either ‘often’ or ‘very often’, won’t answer calls from unknown numbers.
Q. How are fraudsters and nuisance callers attacking the market and subscribers?
Doug: Fraudsters succeed by impersonating someone they believe is going to be trusted. The phone network doesn’t provide any security today at the time of call origination. A call can
be originated, and the fraudster can make up any originating telephone number they want, because we are not securing the network at the time of call origination. So what does the fraudster do? They originate a call from a number they believe is one you should trust. A perfect example of this is a US fraudster calling as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from an IRS number, ‘alerting you to a problem where you need to make a payment to avoid a penalty’. It’s a common use case.
Michael: Now, multiply that approach a million times over through robocall techniques such as predictive diallers and automated call systems and you get more than 200,000 of these calls a minute – of which almost 50% are fraudulent.
Q. What does the industry need to do to restore trust?
Doug: Communications service providers who originate calls on the public network need to make sure every calling party is verified. They have to start by knowing who is originating the call, and then every call (as it is originated) needs to be signed. At the end, when a person receives a call, if there is a concern that the call might be fraudulent, action can be taken. If the call is signed at the time of origination by a known entity, the industry is able to do what is called Trace Back, walking back to where that call came from to identify who and why it was originated. If they turn out to be a bad actor, you can shut them off.
Michael: The technology that does this is called STIR/SHAKEN, and briefly what it does is to create a virtual, trusted sub-network within the PSTN. It positively identifies those callers who are known to be good and, by exception, anybody else should be considered to be potentially bad.
Q. What is NetNumber bringing to the market that addresses this urgent need?
Doug: NetNumber’s role is to provide the industry with the tools to make STIR/SHAKEN a reality for every caller and every call. We provide the country-level services that are needed to make this work, and tools to CSPs who need to provide call signing and call verification functions. NetNumber provides solutions to enterprises that need to be vetted and then have their calls signed at the time of origination so they can be trusted on the network.
On the international side, we help international providers to identify calls destined for termination in the US that need to be signed and trusted. We’re participating in all aspects of helping the industry to implement STIR/SHAKEN.
Michael: These solutions are part of the Guaranteed Caller family, including a national-level, a service provider level, and a TDM variant of the service provider product – required because in today’s standards definitions, STIR/SHAKEN is primarily a SIP and IP phenomenon. There are also enterprise and international elements to this programme. These five form the Guaranteed Caller family of products and NetNumber is the only vendor we are aware of globally to be able to address all five levels of STIR/SHAKEN.
The goal here is to restore consumer’s trust
in the public telephone network within the established timelines. STIR/SHAKEN is the mandated mechanism to do this and NetNumber can help service providers to implement it with Guaranteed Caller, the most comprehensive solution on the market.
