AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson will lead a national task force to fight robocalling. The nation’s largest provider of telecom services said Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler asked Stephenson to lead the Robocalling Strike Force. The group is tasked with accelerating the development and adoption of new tools and solutions to fight robocalls, and with making recommendations to the FCC on the role government can play.
Robocalls and telemarketing calls are currently the No. 1 source of consumer complaints at the FCC. Mobile devices were largely immune to these calls for a number of years, but now the problem is pervasive for wireless subscribers, even though nonemergency robocalls are not supposed to be made to mobile phones without the subscriber’s permission.
FCC chairman Wheeler said in a statement that he has written to the CEOs of major wireless and wireline phone companies calling on them to offer call-blocking services to their customers at no charge. AT&T has responded by agreeing to chair a task force and by outlining the specific steps it will take to fight robocalling. These include:
- Conforming to emerging IETF and ATIS VOIP caller ID verification standards as soon as they are available;
- Investigating and adopting, where viable, SS7 solutions associated with VOIP calls, in accordance with adopted verification standards;
- Working together with the industry, the standards bodies and through the new task force on a “Do Not Originate” list for the purpose of identifying suspicious calls originating outside of the United States; and
- Facilitating efforts by other carriers to adopt call blocking technologies on their networks.
AT&T already allows many customers to block calls using software, but the carrier said robocallers are often able to stay one step ahead of the software by developing ways to evade established filters and black lists.
“To effectively stem the tide of these calls, the communications industry – network providers, handset makers and device OS developers alike – must work together to ensure that only calls from legitimate callers and those associated with legitimate and unaltered numbers are sent to consumer phones,” AT&T said in a statement.
Consumer Affairs estimated that 2.3 billion robocalls were made in the U.S. in the month of January 2016. The areas that received the most robocalls were Atlanta (44.4 million in the 404 area code and 33.6 million in the 678 area code), Houston (36.3 million), Dallas (29.9 million) and Birmingham, Alabama, (25.7 million).
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