More FCC fun - SHAKEN/STIRed
Not the James Bond tagline, but rather a form of certificate exchanges that is required to happen between all service providers to “prove” they are legitimate call sources, for every call made on SIP (VOIP) systems (this is most calls these days, even traditional POTS landlines get converted to VOIP by the baby bells). This is an attempt to eliminate scam phone calls.
Will it work? No.
Is it going to cost the US consumers a billion dollars to implement? Yes!
Has it generated a whole new industry? Yup.
Has the FCC become even more involved in creating policy without “owning the cost” of doing the “governance”? Yup.
Net253 is FCC registered and buys wholesale minutes from one of the top 3 interchanges in the country to transit your phone calls and intertie to the traditional Legacy phone systems. Due to our “type” of registration, we are required to “attest” cryptographically the legitimacy of all calls our customers place. All Net253 phone service customers will see a one time surcharge sometime in September when the dust settles on the fees as they rack up. Remember, whatever the surcharge is you see, we had to pay several hundred times that to multiple vendors and spend multiple hours (days?) wading through FCC paperwork and contracts.
I had my head firmly in the sand for the last year hoping the “2 year extension” that exempted small providers (less than 100,000 phone lines) from these requirements was going to cover me. I had hopes that sanity would be restored and all this horse doo doo would go away. The FCC recently doubled down and changed their rulings (they can do that); we must be compliant by 6/30/2022.
Here is a graphic of what the FCC has “foisted” onto all SIP service providers.
FCC SHAKEN / STIR call flow diagram