Insights

New Industry Standards Help RCD Take Giant Leap into the Future

Oct 05, 2023

According to Pew Research Center, nearly eight in ten Americans say they won’t answer a phone call from a number they don’t know. Scamming is an ever-present problem in the telecom industry, and it’s eroding trust between commercial businesses, consumers and communities. One new major tool to fight back against this problem is Rich Call Data or RCD. RCD is a new standard that enables trusted callers to include rich data that is displayed when a call is received, and available for review by the receiver. This can include a verified calling name, a reason for calling, and a photo or company logo. 

Throughout the telecom industry, many players, including carriers and mobile device manufacturers, have been working hard on developing solutions to combat robocall and telephone fraud issues by establishing trust. This includes the use of the STIR/SHAKEN standards for authenticating a caller. With RCD as a newly available standard, the industry is working toward solutions to enable this rich display of caller information so important and relevant calls are not missed.

Chris Wendt, VP of Systems Engineering at Somos, is a longtime industry veteran and one of the original architects of STIR/SHAKEN. Drawing on a wealth of telecom and standards experience, and as an influential member of the committees working on call authentication and STIR/SHAKEN, Chris has spent the past six years working in the IETF STIR working group, co-authoring the RCD standards document. This is an overarching framework that encapsulates a standard set of protocols and guidelines for delivering protected RCD across the industry. The document outlines a future-proof, extensible framework for supporting many types of potential call and caller metadata. This metadata can be delivered using RCD protocol and within the STIR framework. It will act as a catch-all vault of knowledge on the tool, circumventing various challenges of adoption by containing all the pertinent information a user or technician might need to better understand RCD’s inner workings. The document has already passed Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approvals and will be set for publication in the coming months. 

Once published, this document will form the basis for the telecom industry’s adoption of RCD. The development of RCD solutions will use this spec as the basis for commercial adoption, including solutions that allow business callers to engage their customers in trusted and transparent ways. It will also help with integration into mobile and other rich telephone and communications applications that can display the RCD to the called user. Altogether, the publication of this document marks a significant win for phone users, carriers, and manufacturers everywhere — with the promise of extending the communications paradigm with new rich call data services.

At a time when scamming is so rampant and widespread, consumers and companies alike need a more robust system of trust to make phone-based commerce safer. Nearly 40 billion dollars were lost to phone scamming in 2022, and users are understandably apprehensive about taking calls of all kinds. Paired with STIR/SHAKEN and the evolution of reaching true trust in the telephone network, RCD will be another tool to pave the road towards smoother, trusted, transparent mobile communications and commerce.