Detailed Breakdown
The Problem:
Following the trend in North America, France was experiencing a severe and escalating problem with illegal robocalls, leading to widespread public distrust in voice calls. The French telecom regulator, ARCEP, decided to act. ARCEP created its own variation of the same anti-robocalling rules deployed in the United States, and this variation is known as "The MAN Program." The MAN Program is a nickname for "Mécanisme d'Authentification des Numéros."
The Opportunity:
As a global voice provider, complying with ARCEP's mandate was essential to continue operating in the French voice services market. This challenge presented an opportunity to solidify our position as a trusted international partner and to create a new service offering by acting as a "technical operator" for other carriers who needed help navigating the complex new requirements.
Target Persona:
Our target users were French service providers who needed to comply with the MAN framework. Internally, the project was critical for our Network Engineering, Legal, and Compliance teams to ensure our services remained operational and lawful in a key European market.
Key Insights:
The most critical insight was that ARCEP's MAN framework, while based on STIR/SHAKEN, included several unique requirements that broke a "one-size-fits-all" approach. Details around certificate handling, attestation levels, error reporting, and even encryption methods were different from the North American standard, creating unanticipated complexity and risk for our existing platform.
Product Vision:
To develop and launch a fully compliant STIR/SHAKEN solution for the French market, and establishing a new, scalable "technical operator" service model that could be adapted for future country-specific regulatory frameworks.
Strategic Roadmap:
The strategy was twofold. First, achieve full compliance with the MAN framework by adapting our existing platform. This involved a deep dive into ARCEP's specifications and targeted development work. Second, concurrently develop the operational and business framework to offer our solution as a service to other providers in the French market.
Solution:
We enhanced our core STIR/SHAKEN platform to handle the specific logic required by the French MAN framework. This included creating new configuration options for French operators, modifying our signing and verification services to interpret ARCEP's unique rules, and building new automated reporting that needed to be submitted into a shared repository.
Key Features:
• Full compliance with the French MAN framework.
• Successful handling of French-specific call signing and attestation rules.
• Adapted analytics and reporting for ARCEP compliance.
• A new "Technical Operator" service offering for the French market.
Process & Collaboration:
This project required intense collaboration. I worked closely with our European-based legal counsel to thoroughly interpret ARCEP's technical documents (it's tough building technical requirements from French-only documentation!). Establishing an interop feedback loop with other French carriers helped ensure our solution met both the letter and the spirit of the new law.
Results & Impact:
We successfully rolled out our solution ahead of the regulatory deadline for both our own traffic and for our new "technical operator" customers. This offering successfully converted nearly every current customer to sign up for our regulatory compliant service, and effectively secured our position in the French market as a trusted carrier with a new revenue stream from the new service offering.
Reflection:
The key takeaway was a strategic one: the proliferation of country-specific variations of a "global" standard like STIR/SHAKEN was not going to be sustainable for a global provider like us. Each country represented a significant, one-off development effort. This project highlighted the need for a future platform architecture that was far more modular and configurable to handle diverse regulatory environments without requiring a full engineering cycle for each new country.