Its been a rough week for phones (landline as well as cell)
Our wholesale interchange provider for voice termination has been gobbled into a larger company, the merger is a megaphone carrier, with over 100 million phone numbers supported. They have had a few spectacular “Integration” failures over the last few weeks which have been disruptive to our landline services.
Over the weekend Verizon broke their WiFi calling and SMS (text) transport; it was broken for days.
How can all this be happening all at the same time?
Today is the day that the FCC SHAKEN/STIRED call attestation protocol must be implemented or the carriers can receive a fine if a “robo call” is made. Will this truly stop robo calls? I doubt it; the robo callers will just figure out ways to make “burner” cryptographic attestations behind “shell” companies registered with the FCC.
If you have phone troubles over the next week or so, please do a little troubleshooting before reaching out to us. I expect the problem is not in our portion of the puzzle. If you can browse the internet, use email, stream video, but cannot place WiFi calls or get SMS on your cell phone; it is your cell carrier’s problem, not your internet service nor your router.
We are fully compliant with the new FCC protocol and registered in the FCC robo call mitigation database. We have confirmed that our outgoing calls are fully attested; when we place a call on your behalf, we are presenting proper protocol. The receiving company may not have completed their integration so it is very likely over the next few weeks you will experience trouble dialing some phone numbers.
You will start to see little [V] in the caller ID string. This indicates that the call has been fully verified through the new protocols. On cell phones you will see “verified number” when an incoming call is ringing. These are all indicators of proper call attestation which is supposed to give you confidence the number is legitimate. Who knew this before reading my blog post? The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) did a very poor job of communicating about what this new service is; most consumers have no clue that something fundamental is changing the way phones have connected for the past 100 years effective 9/29/2021.
P.S. In case you are thinking “But I have a landline”. All phone lines are now VOIP. Your incumbent local exchange carrier (Qwest/CenturyLink/Lumen in our case) may sell you “Landline service”, but at the central office it is promptly converted to internet packets and shipped over their internal network to the most economical “interchange” point to complete the call. Everything has to become packetized for the new signaling convention.