AT&T CEO Says He Can't Deploy Robocall Blockers Without FCC Approval. He's Wrong (2016) (web.archive.org)

There's are reasons AT&T are on my permablacklist, and this article (along with a slew of others at the Dallas Morning News) is several of them. AT&T, and other major telcos, are fatally conflicted over telephone solicitations, in all their forms: unsolicited phone calls, robocalls, spam, and scams. They've dragged their feet for decades whilst their subscribers lose billions of dollars to at best useless and unecessary goods and services, and at worst, fraud and scams.

Dave Lieber of DMN ran a series of articles on this as well, I recommend:

"Watchdog Memo to AT&T's CEO: Didn't mean to get you in trouble" <https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2016/07/08/watchdog...>

And:

"Watchdog: AT&T's CEO gets new job, Frontier employees dance during disaster" <https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2016/08/04/watchdog...>

At Techdirt: "AT&T Falsely Blames The FCC For Company's Failure To Block Annoying Robocalls " <https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/02/att-falsely-blames-fcc-c...>

The FCC announcement, voted on June 18, 2015: "Fact Sheet: Wheeler Proposal to Protect and Empower Consumers Against Unwanted Robocalls, Texts to Wireless Phones" <https://web.archive.org/web/20150910081851/https://apps.fcc....> (PDF)

My elderly parents don’t answer the phone anymore due to all the scams. Hospital and medical offices calls all go to voicemail. They do answer FaceTime. Even with this protocol they still struggle because iOS added focus time and it keeps nagging about turning it on. Soon we will lockdown their phones with Assistive Access mode. TLDR scams and hostile UX have made mobile phones unusable.

Anecdotal, but when I switched carriers to ATT, I immediately started getting loads of spam calls. Same number. So it made me think ATT had a leak somewhere in there infra.