Compliance

What “we handle compliance” means

Being the carrier of record is mostly paperwork, record-keeping and answering questions from people who are entitled to ask. This page describes the categories of work we take on. It is deliberately general: the specifics belong in a partner agreement, not on a website, and we would rather say less here than claim something we would have to walk back.

Registrations and filings

Operating as a carrier carries a standing set of registrations, periodic filings and reporting obligations, at both the federal and state level, that have to be kept current whether or not anything interesting happened that quarter. Missing one is not a technicality — it is the kind of thing that ends a company’s ability to originate calls. We keep ours current, and we keep the records that show it.

Numbering

Telephone numbers are administered resources with rules attached: how they are obtained, how they are assigned and reclaimed, how they are ported between providers, and what has to be recorded about each one and kept accurate. We hold that responsibility for the numbers on our network, and we hold our partners to the information we need in order to meet it.

Robocall mitigation and call authentication

Calls that originate on our network carry authentication, and we run a mitigation program aimed at keeping illegal traffic off the network in the first place: knowing who our partners are, knowing who their customers are, watching traffic for the patterns that come before a complaint, and acting on what we find. Enforcement is not theoretical. We suspend or remove traffic, and where it comes to it, partners.

Traceback

When an industry traceback effort asks where a call came from, we answer, and we answer quickly. That is the entire point of a traceback: a chain of carriers each identifying its upstream, ending at the source. Being slow or unhelpful is itself a finding. Our partners agree in advance that we will pass along what we need to in order to complete a traceback.

Lawful process and abuse handling

Subpoenas, court orders, warrants and emergency requests come to us and are handled by us — see law enforcement and traceback. Complaints about specific numbers, from anyone, go to report a number and are investigated against our acceptable use rules.

Records

Most of the above turns into records: who a customer is, what numbers they hold, what calls were placed, what a partner told us and when. Keeping those records complete and retrievable is a compliance obligation in its own right, and it is the reason we can answer a subpoena or a traceback in a useful amount of time.

What we do not claim

We do not list certifications, filing numbers, operating company numbers or registration identifiers on this page. A partner evaluating us should ask for them directly, in writing, and verify them at the source rather than taking a marketing page’s word for it. That is the right way to check a carrier, and we would tell you to do it with anyone else too.

We also do not take on our partners’ own obligations. A provider selling service to end users has duties of its own — to its customers, to the people it calls and to the regulators in the states where it operates. Using a carrier of record does not make those go away, and any carrier that tells you otherwise is selling something.