AT&T, Comcast Announce Verification Milestone To Help Fight Robocalls (usatoday.com)

"The fight against robocalls can even bring telecom rivals together," reports USA Today: AT&T and Comcast said Wednesday that they can authenticate calls made between the two different phone providers' networks, a potential industry first and the latest in the long-running battle against spam calls... The system, which uses a method developed in recent years, verifies that a legitimate call is being made instead of one that has been spoofed by spammers, scammers or robocallers with a "digital signature." The recipient network then confirms the signature on its side. The companies said consumers will get a notification that a call is verified, but exactly what that will look like is not yet known.

Both AT&T and Comcast will roll out the system to home phone users later this year at no extra charge. AT&T also said it will introduce the feature to its mobile users this year... Other major wireless and traditional home voice providers have pledged support for the verification method, including Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Charter, Cox and Vonage, with several announcing plans to roll out or test the feature in 2019.
The day Comcast and AT&T made their announcement, AT&T's CEO was giving a live interview that was interrupted by a robocall.

Comments

Wonderful but I already know when a call is spam

[Vermonter]

I don't want my phone to ring with a little alert that something is a scam. My phone already tells me when something is a potential scam. In fact if its a number I don't recognize, I know that 99 times out of 100 it's a scam. I want my phone not to ring at all. I want the call to get stopped before my phone is even involved. It's not answering a robocall that annoys me, it's having my phone ring in the first place.