Paris, France – i3forum, an industry association focused on driving global collaboration within the communications sector, has launched a new initiative to help restore trust in the international communications industry.
The drive towards a consortium model in the pursuit of collective accountability and collaboration to drive interoperable guidelines is much needed in the face of surging threats and fraud. i3forum is careful of not duplicating other associations’ efforts but wants to better align efforts.
“In the face of surging threats and attacks amid increased digitisation, we are facing an international communications crisis on a global scale. Origination identifiers are being plagued by surging fraud volumes and sophisticated attacks, and there’s misuse and lack of trust,” declares Philippe Milet, founder and chairman of i3forum.
“A paradigm shift is needed in our approach to tackling issues and recommendations. Associations are well positioned to help solve many challenges that impact the international ecosystem, but only if they work together. They’re like jigsaw pieces and if we don’t work together properly with one another and towards the same picture then we can never truly solve the puzzle and challenge. Better yet, by working together from the outset, we can help to influence what the landscape may even look like.”
Associations do valuable work in their own respective areas but i3forum is hoping to forge new partnerships and collaborative ways of embedding respective association workgroups to foster progress. The news comes as the i3forum’s ranks have been bolstered with a new board, new members, and an advisory council.
As part of the launch, which will first focus on international voice traffic, i3forum has established four goals in a globally coordinated international effort:
- Reduce spoofing, spam, and unwanted illegal communications
- Restore trust in voice services and calling line identification (CLI)
- Enable trusted calls with trust identifiers and rich calling data (new service enablement)
- Enable a voice and messaging convergence (covering national and international traffic streams)
i3forum will be looking to achieve its mission to restore trust by helping to establish standardised guidance and solutions, a self-regulated framework with levels of compliance monitoring and enforcement, and joint regulatory activity between the i3forum, associations, industry stakeholders, and national regulatory agencies (NRAs).
“We all share the same pressing issue of how we ultimately communicate with regulators and NRAs when there are so many different approaches, solutions, metrics, and feedback. By working together at the start, we can help to better shape the future,” adds Christian Michaud, executive director of i3forum. “We want to better enable and accelerate transformation across the international carrier and communications ecosystem.”
In 2021, i3forum filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on behalf of the international wholesale carrier community on its proposed rulemaking to fight against robocalling. i3forum will be looking to help regulators and commissions with their calls for industry feedback by collaborating with all parties in the wholesale carrier community to harmonise recommendations and create interoperable guidelines in the complex international telecommunications ecosystem.
If associations don’t come together, the industry ultimately suffers because of complexities, cost, compliance burden, legal penalties, and revenue opportunity loss. Trust is lost, traffic is affected, and calls are unanswered.
Go to www.i3forum.org to get involved.
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