U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai took aim at telecommunications companies on Monday, demanding action to thwart excessive automated phone calls.
Pai is following up on an FCC letter sent to 13 companies in May, asking them to develop a “call authentication system” to prevent the use of “spoof” numbers used by spammers. This latest letter asks for an answer as to what the companies are doing to meet that requirement by November 19.
Among the companies addressed are AT&T, Verizon Communications, T-Mobile, Alphabet, Comcast, Cox Communications, Sprint, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, and Bandwith Inc. Many of those companies do not “have concrete plans to implement a robust call authentication framework,” according to FCC staff.
As a retired Telcom engineer, my opinion; Caller ID could and should be abandoned. As far as stopping the spoofing goes, the Caller ID is a separate data field in the call record from the billing number (has to be). The billing number will always be correct, if the billing number and the caller ID are different, then block or send the true billing number.
Some companies or users had valid reasons for allowing those two data fields to be dissimilar; Doctors or Police that didn’t want the home number to be sent, individual agents (Insurance, etc.) might be out so the Corporations main number could be substituted, and so forth.
But the abuse has gotten so bad, most people think twice before answering the phone anymore. Next step, shutting the phone off when not on a call.
Whitelists of allowed numbers would be a help but the stupid operating companies want to charge extra for that, for a problem that they created.
On the North River 