WASHINGTON and NORTH ANDOVER, Mass. — ATIS today announced the release of a new standard advancing the means for mitigating unwanted robocalling by providing a bounce back message to originating call parties to let them know their call has been blocked.
This message is both critical and strategic. If legitimate calls are improperly blocked, the caller needs to know this so that they can initiate action to resolve the problem, including the contact information where legitimate callers can seek redress. For malicious parties that should be blocked, however, it is important that the feedback mechanism not provide information that might help aid in the development of strategies for unwanted calls to fool call-blocking analytics.
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 such 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+”.
“This new standard is another important new tool developed through ATIS and SIP Forum collaboration to enhance the industry’s means for blocking calls intended to defraud consumers,” said ATIS President and CEO Susan Miller. “It 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.”
“We join with ATIS and others in encouraging widespread adoption of this specification across the entire call processing ecosystem with ‘all deliberate speed,'” said SIP Forum Chairman of the Board Richard Shockey. “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. The SIP Forum deeply values its cooperation with ATIS in our joint Network to Network Task Force that continues to advance the technical state of the art. The work continues.”
Access the Robocall Call Blocking Notification.
