SIP Forum, ATIS Mitigate Unwanted Calls with New Message Standard

Despite the YouMail Robocall Index seeing a 12% decline of robocalls in July, U.S. consumers are still on pace to receive more than 48 million robocalls in 2022. The high volume of robocalls forced phone users and service operators to find ways to slow down the barrage of robocalls.

The SIP Forum and ATIS released a new standard, the Robocall Call Blocking Notification, to help mitigate unwanted robocalling by providing a bounce back message to originating call parties to let them know the call was blocked.

The caller needs to know if legitimate calls are improperly blocked so they can initiate actions to resolve the problem, including the contact information where legitimate callers can seek redress. For malicious parties that should be blocked, however, the feedback mechanism should not provide information that might help aid in the development of strategies for unwanted calls to fool call-blocking analytics.

“This new standard balances the need to provide legitimate callers with a mechanism to seek redress if they have been inappropriately blocked against the desire to limit feedback to malicious callers,” said ATIS President and CEO Susan Miller.

The Robocall Call Blocking Notification addresses the needs of enterprises and others for timely, machine-readable and actionable notification when a call from a legitimate calling party is blocked by the indicated voice service provider due to analytics-based call processing. This ensures that voice service providers can continue to use analytics to block calls suspected to be illegal, fraudulent or for other reasons undesirable, while providing real-time notice to callers.

To provide the notification, this standard defines a profile of the SIP 603 response code defined in RFC 3261, SIP: Session Initiation Protocol referred to in the standard as “603+”.

“Vendors and service providers will need some time to develop code and test, but those of us in the technical community are convinced that 603+ is the best, shortest and least-costly path to implementation and success,” said SIP Forum Chairman of the Board Richard Shockey.

The new standard is a tool developed to enhance the industry’s means for blocking calls intended to defraud consumers.

Edited by Erik Linask