Ribbon Communications Inc., a global software enabler in secure and intelligent cloud communications, is extending its partnership with Neustar, a global information services provider and the exclusive host of the ATIS Robocalling Testbed, to deliver a comprehensive solution designed to combat robocalling and call spoofing.
Earlier this year, Ribbon announced that its software and appliance-based session border controllers (SBC 5000 Series, SBC 7000 and SBC SWe) and its policy and routing (PSX) solutions had successfully completed interoperability testing to support a major industry effort, STIR-SHAKEN, which is designed to help service providers protect consumers against unwanted robocalls and caller ID spoofing.
Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) standards and the Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs (SHAKEN) framework were developed by the IETF and ATIS/SIP Forum NNI Task Force, respectively.
Ribbon and Neustar have teamed up to provide the leading integrated solution to implement STIR-SHAKEN and mitigate spoofed calls and robocalls. The Ribbon session border controller and policy and routing solutions combined with the Neustar Certified Caller solution – offering call authentication, call verification and certificate management capabilities – deliver service providers the ability to quickly detect suspicious calls and notify business and consumer customers of potential illegal robocalls and spoofed calls.
The combined solution will allow service providers to notify their end-user customers of potential spoofed robocalls. The end-users can then choose to either answer or ignore the calls. Currently, the end-user does not receive any indication on the validity of the call.
While baseline standards are in place, Ribbon and Neustar are actively bringing together the service provider community to define STIR-SHAKEN implementation best practices – as evidenced by Ribbon’s STIR-SHAKEN Summit held in early March of 2019. Ribbon and Neustar intend to continue working together to address future enhancements to the STIR-SHAKEN framework as standards and deployment methodologies continue to evolve.
“Nearly half of all calls to mobile phones in the U.S. in 2019 will be scam or robocalls and our joint efforts with Neustar are designed to help our service provider customers address this growing epidemic head-on,” said Kevin Riley, Chief Technology Officer for Ribbon. “Our SBC and policy and routing solutions combined with Neustar’s call authentication and identity protection capabilities will deliver our customers a best-in-class solution to mitigate robocalling and call-spoofing.”
“Ribbon and Neustar are working closely together to deliver a holistic and seamless STIR-SHAKEN solution that will help our service provider customers better serve the end-user by distinguishing legitimate calls from illegal robocalls,” James Garvert, General Manager and Vice President, Caller Identification Solutions, Neustar. “We are passionately committed to working together to help the industry quickly adopt the STIR-SHAKEN standards, which will ultimately result in higher customer satisfaction and trust, by blocking nuisance calls before they reach subscribers.”
