Neustar Expands ATIS Testbed Ahead of STIR/SHAKEN Mandate

As the Federal Communications Commission's June 30 deadline for implementing STIR/SHAKEN approaches, Neustar's Trust Lab is expanding its ATIS Robocalling Testbed to help companies confirm their ability to protect consumersagainst robocalls and caller ID scams.

To date, 66 participants (62 carriers and four vendors) from seven countries have used the testbed in a total of 89 test sessions. The participants represent 70 percent of all active phone numbers in the United States.

In the third quarter of this year, the Neustar Trust Lab will expand the features and functionality of the testbed and migrate into a virtual, flexible cloud-based architecture to support emerging ATIS standards, including delegate certificates, out-of-band, SHAKEN for legacy time-division multiplexing networks, and rich call data.

"When the testbed launched in February 2017, STIR/SHAKEN standards were still under development. The final versions were shaped by real-world experience," said James Garvert, senior vice president of communications solutions at Neustar, in a statement. "As we tested, we provided feedback on interoperability issues to the relevant standards groups and to early adopters of STIR/SHAKEN and identified gaps or inconsistencies to further improve the standards. Testing and standards development informed each other. We aim to scale this same approach internationally to address nuisance calls at a global level while also expanding functionality as the call authentication standards evolve."

The testbed has already supported international interoperability testing between the U.S. and Canada, as both countries prepare for implementation deadlines in June and November, respectively. Other countries can be added as they consider similar regulations.