So, we have to care – and, there’s more. The rise of scamming has thrown this sector into a sharp spotlight, and regulators expect carriers to play their part in reducing fraud. This has generated a swathe of publicity, with a negative spotlight being drawn on the voice industry.
Just a couple of quick examples: the 140% increase in callback Telephone-Oriented Attack Delivery (TOAD) attacks between July and September 2024 Trustwave recently revealed, where a phishing email leads an unsuspecting victims to an apparently legitimate telephone number with a cybercriminal at the other end.
Or how about the rise of AI as a phishing generator—or, as the FBI just revealed, you get a call from a real law enforcement number that might scare you into moving all your money into (their) crypto number?
This isn’t just hype. There are real problems with calls that are putting people off from making voice calls. Apart from social trends about Gen Z being reluctant to take calls from strangers, if consumers start believing any call could be from someone trying to rip them off or cold call them, voice will become less of an attractive market.
And, the onus falls on the carrier to try to filter out such calls. To both avoid surcharges and to play a role in boosting industry confidence, they need to be able to confidently route traffic, which means seeking to check and validate calls that they are asked to deliver to the terminating or onward routing carrier. How do you do that? Number validation.
We absolutely believe in voice. That why we’ve put real-time number validation into the heart of our service, and in a way that’s fully integrated with the native OBR support we already offer.
Specifically, aware of how much a concern number validation is for the voice wholesaler, we decided to enter a strategic partnership with one of the leading companies providing top-end number validation solutions—XConnect—to deal with this.
What XConnect does—really, better than anyone else we’ve looked at—is around pre-validating A-Numbers.
Doing that means carriers avoid having to block traffic due to uncertainty of origin, and so grow customer confidence they’re always going to be offered truly trusted traffic.
The company’s tech is also able to deal with another big number validation problem-- the size of the datasets that, to offer any kind of service to international customers at scale, you really need to be able to work with.
By hosting and maintaining multiple large-scale databases, in other words, XConnect’s services deliver the benefit of query services--avoiding the need to download, integrate, and operate such databases yourself.
Its solutions also guarantee continuous development to support new query use cases and so minimise development requirements. So, it was pretty much a no-brainer for us to decide to incorporate all this into Carrier Cloud. Better still, it’s tightly integrated into the Carrier Cloud core, so the number checks are made locally, in real-time, ensuring efficient processing before routing takes place.
Make number validation the basis of your wholesale voice offer
Going forward, that means Digitalk Carrier Cloud users can therefore be assured that they can go to market with real-time traffic analysis for pre-call admission, backed by cross-referencing call parameters with the latest number validation protection across multiple data sets – helping you to avoid those surcharges and boost the reputation of our sector.
Right now, at $39 billion the global wholesale voice market is in good shape—and could hit $128 billion inside eight years.
Let’s not let surcharges, reputational damage and the criminal activity of these pests disrupt that—and let our new solution to the number validation problem be your part of that.
Contact us today to see how.
