T-Mobile has hit a new milestone in the war with spam calls and texts by establishing STIR/SHAKEN support with all of the major networks in the US. This will go a long way to stopping scammers from evading anti-spam and call blocking methods by falsifying caller ID information. T-Mobile is the first major wireless carrier to meet the goals set forth by the TRACED Act ahead of the June 30th deadline mandated by the FCC.

Scammers notoriously use number spoofing to hide the true origin of a call or text message, sometimes going as far as using an area code matching that of the number they're contacting. The STIR/SHAKEN protocols were designed to make this tactic easily detectable by attaching metadata at the entry point of a call or text and passing it across networks so the destination can determine if the caller ID data is accurate.

T-Mobile's announcement highlights that 98% of all wireless customers in the US are now covered by STIR/SHAKEN through its network. In other words, if a call comes from or goes to a T-Mobile customer, the odds are very good that it has been authenticated and comes from the number that appears in the caller information. While calls can still originate from sources where they can be spoofed, they won't be authenticated and should be marked as unverified numbers.

This isn't the first "first" for T-Mobile in the war against number spoofing. The un-carrier has been leading the charge with the first functioning call verification between two networks in early 2019, and then later across three networks at the end of the same year. Integrations continued into 2020, and T-Mobile finally completed its goal with the integration of Spectrum Voice from Charter Communications.

The TRACED act will go into effect on June 30th, mandating that for all major networks link up STIR/SHAKEN integration with all other major networks. This leaves leaves almost exactly three months for everybody to get their act together. Since the roadblocks for interconnecting each carrier have largely come down to a few nascent networks and completing final testing, we can expect to see quite a few similar announcements before the June deadline.