T-Mobile Partners With Comcast to Fight Against Robocalls

On April 17, T-Mobile with Comcast announced their partnership to fight against the growing robocall issue of the industry. These companies will commence to authenticating the calls that are made between two networks to authenticate for their customers when the one calling is a real person.

It is known that people in the U.S received more than 26 billion unexpected robocalls in 2018, and after pushes from the federal agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, the country’s carriers are starting to implement a system for authentication called the SHAKEN/STIR protocol to fight against them. Two companies will begin to use this protocol to verify the calls that are made between two networks on a small number of handsets.

According to T-Mobile’s CEO, John Legere, spam calls and robocalls are a common problem in the industry, so the company has got to participate forces to protect consumers. He also claimed that T-Mobile is the first one to go across the industry lines to do that.

The protocol verifies real calls thanks to the use of digital certificates which help to determine the place a call is being made. If an authentic caller is authenticated, the company will show “Caller Verified” in the category of Caller ID. It is known that this company started to verify some calls in its network in Jan, and its cooperation with Comcast will add that to the calls made between the customers of T-Mobile and Comcast.

Additionally, the protocol is expected to begin applying to ten devices comprising of the Galaxy S10/S10+/S10E, the S9/S9+, the S8/S8+, the Galaxy Note 8 and 9, and the LG G8 ThinQ. T-Mobile also states that the protocol will be introduced in the Samsung Galaxy Fold, the Galaxy A6 shortly, and other handsets across these networks in the upcoming time. The customers of Comcast will need to wait till the end of 2019 before they can see verification message on the phones.

Eric Schaefer, Comcast Cable’s Vice President, said.

AT&T announced the partnership of SHAKEN/STIR with Comcast too, however, call verification between these two networks has not begun yet. Also, T-Mobile stated that it was planning to cooperate with other network carriers such as Verizon and AT&T in the coming few months to verify more calls made between these networks.

Additionally, the SHAKEN/STIR has some limitations. So far, it is only able to verify that the caller on other lines is a real person. It can’t discover spam calls, which means this system will be much more useful since more networks carry out and permit it to verify the calls made across various service providers.