The purpose of this CXTech Week 3 2024 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech?  The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.

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Covered this week:

• Podcast 24: TADSummit Innovators, Dan Gill, Augnet
• Podcast 25: Truth in Telecoms, Moez Kassam Saved Twilio
• Senate Hearing on “Protecting Americans from Robocalls”
• Congratulations to Manjeet Singh and Amit Bhayani for FlexifyMe
• Webio Delivers Drag and Drop conversational flow builder using Webio’s Custom Credit and Collections Language Model (LLM)
• Anti-trust, a thing of the past?
• Save the Date 23/24 March, TADHack Open 2024
• People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Podcast 24: TADSummit Innovators, Dan Gill, Augnet

The focus of our discussion with Dan is AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic). Everyone mentions Elon Musk ranting about the 390 telcos stealing $60M from Twitter through traffic pumping. But that is so last year.

AIT is being used to destroy the routing tables enterprises (e.g. Google, Meta, Amazon) use for SMS; and because data in SMS is sent in the clear its about to become a massive source for fraud including account take over (ATO).

I do get pushback on what we’ve reported, a comment is, “it sound fantastical.” However, I always remind people of the origins of the A2P industry, premium SMS. Where 20 years ago at the GSMA World Congress in Cannes, there was a special cordoned off section for the ‘Adult Industry’ AKA ‘Pornographers’ to ‘hang out’. MEF originally stood for the Mobile Entertainment Forum. Remember all the complaints on pSMS billing, a one off charge became weekly recurring, J2ME games that did not work on the phone, but you were still charged and never refunded. So many scams, this is where the A2P business began.

The technology to get into the SMS A2P ecosystem is commoditized to the point that any individual manager within an aggregator, or telco, or relative of, or even an enterprise can make big bucks. This situation reminds me of the international bypass fraud, popular a couple of decades ago. It’s just on steroids as it learned from the internet and is applied to the leaky bucket of the A2P SMS ecosystem where everything is sent in the clear. This is not the SS7 hack, this is a vulnerability created by all the unaccredited A2P SMS paths and providers.

Back to the interview. Dan Gill is the CEO and founder of Augnet. Check out their team, its impressive. Augnet addresses the lack of governance in SMS messaging using a vast network of real devices (both SDK in apps and SIM app). He faced this problem through the sale of Skype where he headed up carrier relations across voice and SMS. There simply was no certifications in the SMS supply chain, things like performance measurement were challenging, almost guess work, DLR (Delivery Receipts) can be faked. Hence its open to abuse by the industry itself and any bad actor with a little bit of knowledge.

The routing manipulation uses AIT to lower the performance of competitors’ routes through pumping traffic, so an enterprise like Amazon favors your routes. Spend money on AIT, but win more higher margin revenue. There’s a battle taking place over all the A2P SMS routes. Trust in the A2P SMS ecosystem is only one hop, your partner may connect with companies you do not trust. There’s no accreditation, and often conflicts of interest. There needs to be a source of Truth that is measurable and constantly updated.

It is impossible today for any aggregator to prove 100% of their traffic is white. They may claim 100%, but it only takes one person in any of the organizations that route traffic, or a bad actor that appears a solid aggregator for one country. And that leads to the critical issue of how to you monitor AIT traffic entering your network. These are the problems Augnet addresses, plus some really interesting capabilities around encryption, authentication, geofencing, SMS over IP and network awareness.

Trust in SMS is a critical issue, barriers to bad actor entry are low. AIT is going to enable fraud on a scale we have never experienced over SMS. When Dan shared how trust could be like a HLR look-up, “is this # a real device over a trusted route”. What shocks me is Augnet is coming up to 6 years old, and it is not broadly adopted. The industry needs to act now, else A2P SMS could lose significant credibility by the end of 2024.

We’ll be putting a deeper dive AIT analysis soon to help everyone get up to date on the latest, and drive a conversation around what the A2P SMS industry needs as well as enterprise customers should demand.

Podcast 25: Truth in Telecoms, Moez Kassam Saved Twilio

Summary of Podcast

Moez Kassam, Anson Funds, Twilio’s activist investor, liked Johnny’s post, see below. This is a good indication that the Syniverse deal did lead to Jeff’s exit.

This is not absolute proof, but shows the importance of the question we’ve been asking since the deal was announced, ‘what did Twilio get for the $750M with Syniverse?’

Jeff must have been trying to get an unfair advantage, being able to pump A2P down P2P in the US market through Syniverse. With all the problems that would have ensued as the carriers discover this and demand Syniverse stop that now. I’d heard the Twilio / Syniverse relationship was fraught last year, this jives with the likely situation.

Also Twilio has moved from blocking TF SMS (800SMS) numbers and campaigns without notice, to notifying CSPs that their main account will the suspended for TF SMS. Traffic seems to be flowing at the moment, but the notices have been sent out. To be ‘zipwhipped’ is now a verb. Brands are screaming at the mess TF SMS has become. Twilio paid $850M for Zipwhip and appears to be claiming this market.

Our request to everyone who listens to this blog is please add to this FCC Express Comments on how you, your family, and business have suffered from robocalling and robotexting. We all have a duty to help the FCC and Congress understand this remains a significant problem. https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express, FCC proceedings code is 02-278. There are people claiming STIR/SHAKEN works as complaints have fallen, the truth is we’re all tired of the ineffective action, and fraud losses continues to rise.

On the robocalling issues check out the Protecting Americans from Robocalls senate hearing – check out Mike Rudolph comments in the video. This is a great case study on why this mess of robocalling will continue  And also how pissed some of the politicians are on the topic, see Senator Tester‘s disgust at the situation.

Mike Rudolph mentioned identity, but clearly no one else in the room understood what he meant nor its importance. So he then used account, on how all voice providers must share that robocalling ‘account’ and not provide service. Identity is critical to solving this problem. Change is going to have to come from outside this group.

The Cloud Communications Alliance is rolling up its sleeves and getting even more involved. Check out the Red Oxygen post. And CCA is also supporting TADHack Open before Enterprise Connect.

This week’s TADSummit Innovators was with Dan Gill on how Augnet solves AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic). It’s just like a HLR call. Why hasn’t this been adopted? Johnny used this as a call for the CCA to be the industry’s voice for messaging in North America, given how ineffective the European bookclubs have proven.

Senate Hearing on “Protecting Americans from Robocalls”

Oh my! This hearing demonstrated why we’re in the state we are on robocalling.

I watched the Senate hearing on “Protecting Americans from Robocalls” from Tuesday, October 24, 2023. This is a great case study on why this mess of robocalling will continue 🙁

What I found a little shocking from some of the people in the room are:

• STIR/SHAKEN is considered a success, we just need broader adoption across the ecosystem. The reality is STIR/SHAKEN is only partially implemented covering VoIP gateways, not PSTN gateways. As we discussed with Gerry Christensen (Podcast 20) on the TADSummit Innovators podcast, https://lnkd.in/eYYnshJ3.
• In the limit STIR/SHAKEN only puts a little green check on a portion of calls that are NOT spoofed. It does not identify calls that are spoofed, and says nothing about calls that are scams. Most iPhone users cannot see the check mark until after the call by looking in their call history.
• “A” level attestation has been proven compromised. That is the identity of the caller is known, and they have the right to use the Caller ID for this call. Meaning robocalls are being marked “A” level (good).  Carriers can not trust one another. So we have the current situation of send your calls and texts and we (the carriers) will decide what is acceptable, delivered, or blocked/censored.
• A common view is the DOJ needs to do more enforcement. Its whack-a-mole game, DoJ enforcement will reduce US-based fraud, but not international sources. Enforcement is expensive (lawyers are expensive), so scams become smaller, more targeted, and more ephemeral. A longer tail. More enforcement will only change where the moles pop up. And waste even more $$$, you can see in the video Senator Tester is frustrated 😉

Technologies behind robocalling keep improving and getting cheaper so more crooks build side hustles of robocalling, and mash that up with the mature internet fraudsters.

Check out Mike’s testimony, https://lnkd.in/emMEhJmm. He’s the only person in the room that mentioned identity, and adeptly realized the room didn’t understand what he meant nor its importance, so used account.

There’s a long road ahead of us to successfully stop robocalling if this is our only route!

Zipwhipping anyone not called Twilio

At the start of this week I asked if anyone was having problems with your TF (Toll Free) SMS / 800SMS campaigns in the US.

Back then I’d had 3 brands have contact me about problems with 800SMS. Both campaigns and numbers no longer working. These are well-known brands that have successfully used the numbers and campaigns for at least one year.

Many brands moved from 10DLC to 800SMS in an attempt to avoid the issues we’ve identified. However, it looks like 800SMS is also having some issues at the moment.

Some of the comments through the processes were infallible and they must be spammers. Knowing the brands and the people, that most definitely is not the case. But does show a problem around customer experience where people are assumed guilty.

By the end of the week Twilio had moved from blocking TF SMS (800SMS) numbers and campaigns without notice, to notifying CSPs that their main account will the suspended for TF SMS. Traffic seems to be flowing at the moment, but the notices have been sent out. To be ‘zipwhipped’ is now a verb. Brands are screaming at the mess TF SMS has become. Twilio paid $850M for Zipwhip and appears to be claiming this market.

The A2P SMS market in the US can only be described as a mess at the moment, it’s embarrassing.

Congratulations to Manjeet Singh and Amit Bhayani for FlexifyMe

Amit has been part of TADSummit since the beginning, he was a co-founder of Telestax, that sponsored the first TADSummit in Bangkok. We sited TADSummit in Bangkok as Telestax were running an event there, ITU Telecom World also running there helped.

Manjeet has presented at TADSummit in 2015, and I did an interview with Manjeet about his start-up Buddy4Study.

Amit and Manjeet founded a chronic pain management platform FlexifyMe has raised Rs 10 crore in its seed funding round co-led by IvyCap Ventures Advisors Private Limited and Flipkart Ventures.

The round also saw the participation of GSF, Chandigarh Angels Network, Venture Catalysts++ | India’s 1st Multi-Stage VC, and ah! Ventures.

FlexifyMe provides personalized chronic pain management solutions by using AI, machine learning, and data analytics.

Its software analyses joint movements, connecting users with expert orthos, physiotherapists, and yoga therapists, providing a permanent solution to chronic pain.

According to FlexifyMe, it aims to assist corporates in comprehending ergonomic challenges, eradicating postural misalignments, enhancing employee productivity, and ensuring continuous health monitoring—contributing to stress alleviation and overall improvement in lifestyle disorders.

FlexifyMe claims to have a user base of more than 50,000 from 25 countries. Well done Amit and Manjeet 🙂

Webio Delivers Drag and Drop conversational flow builder using Webio’s Custom Credit and Collections Language Model (LLM)

As Paul Sweeney promised at TADSummit, Webio has delivered a totally new UI to deliver a next generation customer service experience.

– New drag and drop conversational flow builder
– New agent actions pane with entities, intents, and propensities
– Powered by Webio’s Custom Credit and Collections Language Model (LLM).

Paul’s TADSummit presentation from October opened many people’s eyes to the architecture, processes, and reasons behind Webio’s design choices.

Anti-trust, a thing of the past?

Given the craziness over the past few months in telecoms, it looks like the Analytic Engines (First Orion, Hiya, and Transaction Network Services) thought to have a go at consolidating leads to their triopoly with the Free Caller Registry.

Numeracle has been leading the charge with multiple FCC filings on the AE antics. Their business can be summarized as: “Your calls not getting through because of our ratings? No problem, $40k please and we’ll sort our ratings out for you.”

Free Caller Registry enables entities making outbound phone calls to submit their data to the providers of spam protection services for the three major U.S. wireless carriers using a standard, centralized website. These services — often called analytics engines — power detection and flagging of calls with labels such as “Spam Risk” and “Scam Likely.” I wonder if its a honey pot to attract spammers? Likely they’d be the first ones to register.

A business registers for free, at Free Caller Registry, and my guess is they then get a sales call that ends with a $40k proposal on how to improve their call completion…

Save the Date 23/24 March, TADHack Open 2024

A big thank you to STROLID and The Cloud Communications Alliance for their support of TADHack Open 2024. We hope to add a couple more sponsors and partners over the coming months. The prize pot will get bigger as more sponsors come onboard.

Check out this winning hack built for STROLID at TADHack Global 2023, its a great resource. Plus you can learn about Jupyter Notebook, a web-based interactive computing platform that combines live code, equations, narrative text, visualizations, and more. I see more and more developers using them at work, its an important skill to have in your toolbox.

In conjunction with Enterprise Connect since 2017 we run the pre-conference hackathon, TADHack Open. Winners from TADHack Open present at Enterprise Connect at a conference slot dedicated to TADHack. The session normally has 60-80 people attend.

TADHack Open works with groups committed to increasing the influence that women have in building the technologies that shape our culture and change our world. At TADHack Open 2023 we achieved equal representation between women and men, a first for TADHack. We hope to continue to achieve this balance again in 2024.

The hub location is Valencia College in Orlando, we’ve run at this location since partnering with Enterprise Connect in 2017. We accept remote hacks from around the world. The remote entry procedure is here: https://blog.tadhack.com/2023/02/02/tadhack-open-remote-entry-procedure/.

In early-March we’ll run live online (and recorded) sessions on how to use the TADHack Open sponsors’ resources. Save the date of 23/24 March, whether you plan to take part in-person or online, we’re excited to see your hacks  To register click on the green Register Now! button on the TADHack Open landing page.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Darryl Weaver is now Solutions Architect at Mirantis. We first met in 2014, at TADHack Global, he worked for Canonical, at TADHack sponsor and helped with the demo IMS in Minutes.

Erik Beijer is now a Senior Software Developer at Itok Software development AG located in Bern, Switzerland.

Here is Erik’s hack from TADHack-mini Paris, he was with CM.com at the time.

Paul Stovall is now Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) – G2 Risk Solutions.

David Mammadov has starting a new position as Advisor to General Director at Ultel. I’ve known David for one decade, since his time at AzQTEL.

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