The real problem with robocalls

Robocalls have become unavoidable, flooding phone networks with spam so thoroughly that most people have stopped picking up calls from unknown numbers. It’s a massive and embarrassing technological failure, but the causes behind the problem are more complex than you might think.

The biggest problems are baked into the network itself. As the internet moves to fiber optic cable (the modern broadband network), phones have, too, sharing infrastructure with the public internet and cable TV. That’s come with new risks, as the phone network grows more exposed to internet-based attacks. But it also has new rewards, as the IP-based system can execute more complex authentication protocols to ward off spam.

The problem is, US networks are only...

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