CALCULATE –
Canada’s telecom regulator is asking telecom companies to deploy new technology to give Canadians some relief from fake and fraudulent phone calls.
In a speech at the Canadian Telecommunications Summit in Toronto on Monday, CRTC president Ian Scott said the country’s telecommunications companies must update their networks until November 30 to meet the standard. technique that allows telecommunications service providers to authenticate the identity of the caller.
Scott said unwanted calls, or calls from bots, have become such a common problem that they are contributing to the “erosion of trust in the telecommunications system”.
“On the order of 25%, or more than 25%, of all calls made on cellular networks are automated calls,” Scott said in an interview after his address. “It’s a huge problem and it will require a tremendous effort by regulators and industry cooperation to solve.”
In 2019, the CRTC approved the creation of the Security Token Administration of Canada, an industry group whose role is to encourage industry-wide adoption of policies, protocols, and operating procedures to reduce behavior. vi spoofing and calling from illegal robots.
One piece of the puzzle is called Secure Telephone Information Revisited, or STIR, a technical standard that provides a means for service providers to authenticate the identity of callers.
The other component, called “Shaken,” stands for “signature-based processing of information confirmed using tokens” and refers to the framework’s standard implementation in the network. IP-based service providers.
While the only deadline Canadian carriers have to meet at the end of the month is to update their networks to allow the technology to be deployed, Scott said the vision is to give Canadians the ability to identify which calls are coming from. legitimate and worth answering and any calls should be treated with caution.
Finally, Scott said the call recipient may see the caller ID pop up with a “red light” or a “green light” next to the name, indicating that the caller’s identity has been verified by the carrier. service or not.
Scott adds that the CRTC has also asked service providers to provide their subscribers with the ability to filter calls or implement a call blocking system.
He said Bell Canada went the extra mile when it filed an application with the CRTC to permanently block calls that were confirmed to be scams on the company’s network. He said Bell has been testing the technology for the past two years and has blocked more than 1.1 billion calls between July 2020 and October 2021.
The CRTC is currently reviewing Bell’s application and expects to make a decision soon, Scott said.
Other carriers should also consider ways they can do more to protect their subscribers against annoying and potentially harmful activity on their networks, Scott added, unsolicited calls. It is often used by criminals to trick hard workers into taking their money and sensitive data.
It should be service providers, not consumers, who must pay the costs associated with implementing robotic call mitigation technologies, he said.
“This is not an opportunity to make a profit, but an opportunity to interact with and support your customers and build their confidence in your ability to serve,” Scott said in his keynote.
This Canadian Press report was first published on November 15, 2021.
