Quality Voice & Data Attains Authorized SHAKEN Service Provider Status
Quality Voice & Data, Inc., a national telecom carrier licensed by the FCC, has been authorized as a SHAKEN Service Provider by iconectiv, the STIR/SHAKEN administrator — one of the first carriers to meet the rigorous requirements necessary to provide call attestation at the highest level for its customers.
Federal and state agencies worked with the telecom industry to evolve how callers are identified and traced back to their originator, in response to an avalanche of illegal scam robocall complaints. "Back in the 80s, telephone companies ran a wire to a phone in a building, and a call could be traced back using that wire to find the building. New technologies replaced that wire with VoIP, which replaced it with an IP address, making it almost impossible to trace a call back to its originator — hence illegal robocalls continue to plague us all," said QVD's CEO.
The TRACED Act, signed into law January 6, 2020, requires the FCC to mandate STIR/SHAKEN authentication on all IP networks and reasonable measures on non-IP networks. Today, 95% of US wireless carriers have already adopted the SHAKEN framework, with wireline carriers expected to follow over the next year and a half.
The framework requires authorized SHAKEN providers to digitally sign customer calls and, critically, to know who those customers are — giving regulators an easy way to trace any call back to its origin, and putting any carrier that fails to identify its customers at risk of losing its ability to sign calls at all.
QVD's Trusted Call Completion® service starts by making a business a TrustedCaller™, introducing it to the telephony ecosystem as a legitimate caller through third-party verification aligned with the TRACED Act and SHAKEN framework. From there, QVD's Local Caller ID numbers are vetted in real time against multiple databases and the leading authentication hub, so they aren't blocked or labeled as spam from the outset. QVD's Monitoring & Remediation™ service then tracks in real time how a customer's calls appear across major wireless handsets, using the same authentication hub — which processes over one billion daily call events across more than 400 carriers — to remediate a block or mislabel on over 50% of US wireless handsets. Finally, QVD terminates outbound calls over its Elastic SIP trunk directly to other SHAKEN carriers, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular, ensuring calls are signed and delivered with the highest level of attestation.
"We are thrilled to be part of bringing trust back to the telecom ecosystem, and more importantly ensuring the telephone numbers used by our customers have a good reputation," QVD's CEO added. "As SHAKEN becomes fully adopted by all telecom carriers, blocking and labeling algorithms that can't differentiate between legitimate calls and scammers will become less of an obstacle for our business customers."
