Black Swan Telecom Journal

Exactly how do you explain your telecom fraud fighter job to someone at a cocktail party? That’s a tough task!  The trouble is it may take time to explain the context — describe how telecom services are delivered and paid for, then show how criminals steal money by corrupting the process. A faster path is to use an analogy and say, “My job is to be a kind of detective of crimes committed against telecom providers.” That analogy works, but iconectiv has come up with an even better one.

Telecom fraud protection is never permanent. Any success is merely a temporary safe haven like the eye of a typhoon where the winds are calmer and the skies are clear. But of course, as soon as the eye passes on, you’re hit with the full strength of the storm. Protection is short-lived because fraudsters never stand still: they constantly seek to: discover an operator’s fraud triggers; improve their own automation; hide in data outliers; and step up the speed and variety of their attacks.

STIR/SHAKEN is a now widely-adopted protocol enabling telecoms to feed calling party attestation info to consumers when they receive a call from businesses and organizations of all types and sizes. First launched by the large U.S. telcos in early 2020, STIR/SHAKEN is helping reduce illegal telemarketing and spam calls. The protocol is now adopted by more than 400 telcos of roughly 1,500 in America overall. STIR/SHAKEN is also an important tool for restoring consumer trust in answering phone calls.

Subsea cables are among the roughest and hardest-working digital systems you’ll find anywhere. And talk about a harsh environment: subsea cables work on the ocean’s floor, about 4,000 meters deep on average in the Pacific. That depth is six (6) times lower than the so-called “crush depth”, the depth at which a modern naval submarine’s hull will collapse from severe water pressure (about 69 times atmospheric pressure).

Dear Colleague: The power of global networks and personal digital devices has brought us both the blessings of convenience and the curse of new, digital-enabled fraud threats, identity theft, account takeovers, and other security problems. Hello, I’m Dan Baker, Research Director of Technology Research Institute (TRI), an independent analyst firm for 25 years.

Amazon, the global e-commerce leader, is an amazing company, yet it got a big head start when it launched its business in America where the supporting infrastructure is strong: The U.S. marketplace has 320 million, high-income consumers, and an economy that is 24% of the world’s total. Communications infrastructure is excellent across both wireline and mobile. Fully 94% of the people have access to broadband.

The race to deliver broadband and digital content to Southeast Asia (SEA) is an Olympic struggle. Big Tech giants, regional ISPs and local content providers are all competing for a share of eyeballs and fresh digital markets. And as the Tokyo Olympics scoreboard shows, gold medals are earned by competitors both large and small. . . As you’d expect, big nations like USA, China, and Russia top the list of Tokyo medal winners.