Back in the days when telephones used copper wire I used a ‘BT 8500 Advanced Callblocker’ phone to get rid of my spam. It worked very well. Anyone who called and was in my phone book was connected normally, anyone else got sent to voice mail. If they spoke, my phone rang and I could listen to the message to decide whether to pick up. Most sales calls gave up the moment they heard the answerphone. The only problem was my brother who, being a Doctor, blocked his phone number. He had to learn to wait while I accepted the call. Recently I have moved to VOIP and use Fritz!box router which provides both analogue and direct digital connection to DECT phones. It generally works well but the is a big BUT with the analogue phone connection and the BT Advanced Call Blocker phone. Buried somewhere in the small print on the TrueCall website is the following disclaimer:
We don’t recommend that you use trueCall with VoIP adaptors.
The BT phone is based on Truecall technology and the same applies. Although the main telephone technology worked most of the time, I got strange faults. Tone dialing on IVR switchboards sometimes did not work. The time on the phone was not set automatically. The crunch came when I slipped a disk and needed an ambulance urgently. I found I could not dial 999.
I bit the bullet and purchased some Gradstream A690HX Cat-IQ 2 compatible DECT phones. They paired flawlessly with the router. The only issue was the spam calls came back. I get about 2 a week.
Not a big issue, but I have too much time on my hands and like to tinker. Despite extensive Googling the only ray of hope was with a german firm Tellows who have a product that is supposed to maintain a list of all numbers used for spamming. I was sceptical, but thought it worth a try. As expected, after 3 months the score is no calls blocked by Tellows, 25 spam calls answered by your truely.
The Fritz!Box is a very flexible beast. It supports multiple answer phones, extensive call routing and many other star features. The plan was to implement two answer phones, one with a mesage along the lines ‘Your phone number has not been recognised. If you like us to return your call please leave a message’, the second: “Hi. Its Bill and Ben. We cant come to the phone right now. Please leave a message.’ Program up the box to route the caller to the appropriate answerphone and job done.
After two days of fiddeling I had to admit defeat. Although I can implement two answer phones, I can only assign one to an incoming number. There is a fall back position. In desperation emailed the Fritz!box Support desk. They are excellent, despite being a German company, they speak perfect english and respond with one working day. The response I recieved not only stated they had passed a ‘whitelist’ feature as a new feature request, they alsosuggested a work around. Its bit messy. I have to implement an dummy internal number and then use call diversion to set up the correct routing. Here are the detailed instructions:
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