Is Your Telephone Carrier SHAKEN Your Leg on Attestation?
Are your calls being tokenized? Your carrier says yes. But are those tokens actually being delivered to the carriers that count? That's the real question.
Most carriers are still playing catch-up — many doubted SHAKEN would become a real requirement and delayed the hard work, and now downplay its importance to your answer rate while they scramble to deploy it. It's technically true that tokens alone won't stop your calls from being blocked or labeled, but that statement, on its own, is disingenuous — the delay has already cost answer rate.
The carriers that matter are heavily invested
A large share of the nation's telecom network isn't yet 100% SHAKEN, and the FCC has given rural carriers extra time to get there. But the carriers that matter most — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast — are heavily invested in both SHAKEN and call-labeling/blocking algorithms. If your carrier isn't tokenizing 100% of your calls with an A attestation, it's worth switching. Every algorithm gives heavy weight to a SHAKEN call carrying an A attestation, and if your calls are properly SHAKEN, a call to a friend's Verizon or T-Mobile cell phone should display a checkmark or "Verified Caller" on their handset. If it doesn't, your carrier either isn't SHAKEN or doesn't have SHAKEN routes to the carriers that count.
Why SHAKEN and blocking algorithms work together
As more SHAKEN tokens appear on the network, algorithms weight them more heavily — an A attestation confirms the number isn't spoofed, the caller is a known entity, and the call traces back to its originator. A B attestation flags an unrecognized Caller ID the carrier needs authorization proof (like an LOA) to vouch for — a potential spoofing signal. A C attestation, sometimes inserted by intermediary carriers for calls that arrive with no token at all, is effectively a death sentence for a call's answer rate.
Quality Voice & Data was an early SHAKEN adopter
The FCC recognized Quality Voice & Data as an early SHAKEN adopter, giving us time to build SHAKEN routes to the carriers that matter most. Pairing our SHAKEN SIP trunks with Monitoring & Remediation registers each customer's numbers with the authentication hub used by leading algorithms, so a bad algorithm decision gets remediated immediately, before other algorithms follow suit. As the top supplier of telecom services to contact centers for over a decade, we know that ALOC and velocity of dials are two of the most important factors in getting SHAKEN calls delivered — and we can help with both.
