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T-Mobile is the first carrier to activate anti-spoofing technology with all other major carriers
Everybody else has three months to catch up
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.
The second Android 11 Developer Preview rolls out today, and though it still isn't meant for general consumption just yet, it introduces quite a few new technical tweaks that app-makers and Android enthusiasts will enjoy playing with. While we start digging for undocumented changes, we already have a small list of tweaks to peruse in this latest release.
Sprint and T-Mobile are latest carrier pair to adopt STIR/SHAKEN anti-spam phone number verification
Following T-Mobile's collaborations last year with AT&T and Comcast, the company is now working together with Sprint to help cut back on spam calls. Today T-Mobile and Sprint have announced they're implementing the STIR/SHAKEN anti-spam standards between their two networks, forging yet another carrier pairing that will eventually culminate with industry-wide call verification.
Today US President Donald J. Trump has signed into effect the TRACED (or Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence) Act, aimed to prevent unwanted spam/robocalls, authorizing fines up to $10,000 per illegal call with no advance warning, extending the statute of limitations for violations to four years, and imposing a requirement that carriers implement call authentication solutions, like the existing SHAKEN/STIR verification tech.
The war against robocalls has heated up this year: In June, the FCC ruled that US phone carriers could block robocalls by default, as well as allow users to automatically block unknown phone numbers from ever reaching their devices. This prompted more than ten US service providers to offer free call blocking features to all of their customers. This week, AT&T is furthering its robocall fight by enabling call verification for select Android devices.
Over the last few years, robocalls have quickly grown into one of the most universally despised issues among mobile phone users in the US. The seemingly exponential growth of spam calls has us heading toward a time where a majority of the phone calls made are spam. Today, T-Mobile, Comcast, and telecommunications company Intelliquent are announcing a technical milestone in the war on robocalls — the first call routed across three networks using an end-to-end implementation of the FCC recommended STIR/SHAKEN cryptographic security framework.
Automatic call blocking is now the rule of the land thanks to your very own United States federal government — that means you should be getting fewer robocalls and cold dials from spoofed (faked) numbers. It also means the roll-out of a two-part authentication system between the network sending and the network receiving named SHAKEN/STIR. This very system has just been deployed for calls between the AT&T and T-Mobile networks.
FCC chairman Ajit Pai is preparing a new set of anti-robocalling measures that the commission will vote on during its next public meeting on June 6. The ruling would compel carriers to make automatic call blocking an opt-out feature for customers rather than an opt-in feature. Pai has a couple of suggestions for filtering methods including one based off the customer's own contacts list on their phone.
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- Verizon has announced that its robocall-battling initiatives are now live. First, users are getting a free version of the carrier's Call Filter service, which alerts them of spam. Second, Verizon's STIR/SHAKEN caller ID tech is rolling out this week. It will verify numbers and identify spoofed ones.
Following on the heels of T-Mobile's similar announcement last week, Verizon is set to roll out robocall and spam call protection to all of its customers starting in March. It will be available to all users who have "smartphones [that] support these features," including iPhones and Android devices.
The latest update to Google Messages hit earlier this week, and while it's featuring a few visible changes, including a new setting to enable Suggested Actions and a new About screen, the most interesting changes aren't intended to go live quite yet. We already know Google is adding Assistant integration to Messages, and now some of that is manifesting in the app. But the most exciting addition is support for a great new carrier-level feature called Verified SMS that may put an end to scam messages (and calls).