You don’t want to do blocking on STIR/SHAKEN data. We’re not there yet. That’s the big message in this podcast. Mark Lindsey at ECG tells us that, “You don’t want to cause an Earthquake by doing the right thing.” Mark and his team consulted with their colleagues at Microsoft Teams, and our relationships at major STIR/SHAKEN software providers Neustar (part of TransUnion), TransNexus, and Sansay.  This gave them insight into the data and wisdom of many engineers and managers at major service providers and at software firms. The undisputed result is this: Every expert recommends against blocking based on SHAKEN data available today. Now this was a little surprising: the very companies that are most likely to benefit from using the STIR/SHAKEN data are saying "woah -- you have to hold off!"

This podcast gives us a first look at longer presentation Mark will make: SHAKEN without the EARTHQUAKE" to be presented at SIP Forum's SIPNOC meeting, September 12-14, 2023, in Herndon, Virginia.

We learn more about ECG’s approach to this situation. ECG gives Service Providers the temporary experts they need to make their networks effective and compliant for all kinds of Voice Service Provider projects. It's critical for Service Provider leadership to audit to verify STIR/SHAKEN implementation is working. And if you're relying on a Third-Party Certificate company to sign your calls for you, there's every reason to believe that practice will be blocked by the FCC soon. You need a way to protect your customers against spam calls, without creating an outage when you do it. ECG can work with your engineering team to find and implement protection against spam calling. If your calls are flowing through TDM-only PSTN Gateways, many of the calls made by your customers will likely be labeled as "Spam Likely." You need to look at ways to get better SIP interconnection to protect your customers and your core business.