about

Closing the gap between who you are and how the network represents you — so that trust online carries the same consequence it does in the real world.

I’m Chris Wendt. For most of my career I’ve worked at the standards layer of how communication is represented, and how it’s trusted — from the encoding of a signal, to the identity of the person behind a call, to the rules that hold that identity accountable. Like most careers it has been accidental but not: a series of opportunities that, in hindsight, follow a single thread.

Signal

My background is in acoustics and audio: graduate work on acoustics and audio coding, and early research at Bell Labs on 3D audio and DSP programming. From there I got my first taste of standards work in ISO-MPEG — video, image, and audio compression — through Sarnoff Research and a startup it was funding. The common thread across all of it was the integrity of representation: how to encode a signal so that what comes out the other side is faithful to what went in.

Self

From there I moved into telecommunications — first mobile chipsets, then nearly two decades at Comcast, one of the largest voice providers in the US, building SIP and IP voice networks at scale, and my introduction to the IETF. That put me at the origin of STIR and, through the ATIS IP-NNI Task Force, the development of SHAKEN. The question had moved up the stack: no longer “is this a faithful copy of the signal,” but “is this a faithful claim of identity” — authentication of the telephone number as an anchor of trust for the network.

Society

STIR/SHAKEN pulled the work into the regulatory world — the FCC and other regulators, and now, globally, ITU-T. Here the question becomes accountability: making verifiable identity enforceable, so that trust in the network carries the same weight of consequence it does in the physical world — across providers, and across borders.

Signal, self, society: the same idea moving up the stack — the authenticity of how something, and then someone, is represented, and the accountability that has to stand behind it.

What I’m working on

The physical world earns trust through accountability: you can find who is responsible, and there are consequences. The digital network broke that link at scale. My work is about putting it back — binding authority to the identifier and making trust transitive and verifiable, so it survives every hop; giving people control over how they present themselves, on their own terms; and closing the gap between the two worlds so the digital one can be as accountable as the physical one.

The work I’m most invested in right now is VESPER — a STIR profile I’m authoring that extends verifiable caller ID to entities authorized by providers, anchored in internet domain names, with transparency, and privacy protected when the caller chooses. It’s the bridge from the trust framework we built for traditional voice into the one we’ll need for the next decade of communications: messaging, RCS, and the agentic AI calls coming whether we’re ready or not.

I develop this in the open. The library is the technical reference — the standards and concepts of trust and identity; the notebook is where I work out the argument.

Disclosure

Everything here is written from a position, and it’s better that you know what it is. I don’t observe this industry from outside it. I co-chair some of the bodies I write about, author drafts that compete with other drafts, and argue in those rooms for specific outcomes — generally for open, interoperable, consumer-protective standards over proprietary alternatives. It is a point of view, not a neutral survey, and the venues and roles it comes from are on the public record.

Two commitments follow. Everything I publish here is drawn from public sources — published specifications, drafts, meeting materials, and public statements; I participate in forums that circulate member-confidential material, and none of it appears here. And nothing here is written on behalf of my employer or any body I participate in. The views are mine, including the ones my colleagues would disagree with.

How to reach me

Email is best: chris@appliedbits.com. I’m on LinkedIn and GitHub, and the notebook has an RSS feed. For a ready-to-use bio, the fuller public record of standards work, or board and advisory work, see those pages.