[VoiceOps] STI-CA average pricing

[Nathan Anderson]

Starting to collect quotes for SHAKEN cert signing from STI-CAs, and got our first response back.

I also got whiplash at the same time.

Although I didn't have to sign an NDA or agree to any kind of confidentiality in order to get this response, since nobody seemingly wants to publish their pricing, I will (at least for the time being) keep both the quote itself as well as the vendor name close to my chest.  But...dang.

Though I'm hoping to be surprised, I'm guessing that there isn't a wide difference in pricing between various STI-CAs.  Can people here confirm that I'm likely to mostly hear same-y figures from others?  Or if there are options that are significantly cheaper than others, who do y'all recommend that I should be talking to?

Note that I'm only talking about the CA component as a standalone offering, though I'll observe that with very few exceptions, it also doesn't seem like too many vendors are either willing to unbundle the CA service from their overall "end-to-end cloud-based SHAKEN" products, or if they are, they seemingly don't like to publicize it.

To put my response to this pricing in context, we are a relatively small regional broadband provider, and voice is a fraction of a fraction of our business.  I'd wager just about everyone else here has a larger voice subscriber base than we do, and most of you probably didn't blink when you saw the price-tag on what it would take to become part of the STIR/SHAKEN ecosystem...just the cost of doing business, right?

We do have effective CLID anti-spoof already & have since the beginning, and as a small provider, we also were *supposed* to have another 12 months to get up to speed on all of this and start signing calls...at least, that was the case until the FCC moved that timetable up in what I can only describe as a Darth Vader-esque "altering [of] the deal".  We didn't get that memo in December but only about 3ish months ago, and it's not like I don't have plenty of other things to do, so I'm already coming into this project plenty pissed off...

*sigh* Anyway, I can see that the gate-keepery-ness of this industry is still alive and well.  Though I can understand wanting to keep out the riff-raff, you would think that all of the hurdles that one needs to clear in order to get this far -- getting an OCN, on-boarding with the STI-PA, etc. -- would be enough without also throwing yet another huge mandatory & ongoing expense on top of the pile as well.

Sorry.  Didn't mean for this to turn into a rant, but...ugh.

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Nathan Anderson
First Step Internet, LLC
nathana at fsr.com