301–310 of 367 posts
I can’t imagine why anyone ever answers the phone. I get at least ten robocalls every weekday. I don’t ever look at my voicemail and I haven’t answered a call in ages. Edit: I know I’m not alone because CNN just released a poll with no responses from people under the age of fifty, because they couldn’t reach enough of them by phone.
I don't understand why the USA doesn't pass laws to address this.
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I've never heard of this before. Unfortunately after checking it out, it looks like my carrier only offers it for iphones. This does look like a handy feature though.
Google Voice will transcribe any VMs and send them as a text. The transcription is good enough to know if it's someone you need to call back or add their number to your block list.
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How do you get--and keep--a job? Have friends? Make medical appointments? Order pizza?
For the last one - meteoric rise of services like JustEat meant that I haven't had to ring anyone to order food for at least 8 years now. If your restaurant is not on justeat/Uber eats/you have your own website that allows ordering, then I'm not interested in ordering from you. Also, if you order through a phone how do you pay? In cash??
Otherwise, we need to set the rules and pricing conditional for being a part of +1 to mitigate this issue.
No disrespect to Canadians, but I wonder if most Canadians are aware of how much fraud operates out of Canada and takes advantage of the +1 area code plus the protections of being in another nation. This isn't just Carribean Island nations as people tend to stereotype.
(Please miss me with the whataboutism, I'm not throwing stones simply sharing information and experience.)
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Absolutely. The phone system is totally broken. A few years ago I disabled the incoming call part of my phone to everyone except a few family members and my wife. So far it's been great. Everyone who needs me emails me. I've yet to run into a situation where someone I needed to hear from would only call me.
Just not willing to do this. I never want to miss a call from someone talking about an emergency with a family member, the FAA calling about an unclosed flight plan, a recruiter (if job hunting), a delivery person, etc. I answer virtually all unknown numbers except the ones T-Mobile puts in as “Scam Likely.” What I do not understand is, given that the phone is a computer, why there is not an on-phone IVR which can so…
I ported my landline number to Callcentric partially just to rid myself of the AT & T $75/mo charge and partially because of Callcentric's call handling.
Callcentric (and I'm sure others) allow call routing rules which include inputs for spam ranking, whitelist and IVR routing. You can upload your contacts, whitelist those for passthrough and then send anyone else to a simple "please press " prompt first before routing to you if they pass the test.
https://www.thetelecomspot.com/grandstream-ht801.html
If you prefer to own the hardware yourself, it's possible to do the same by loading asterisk on a raspberry pi.
I wonder if the solution is remarkably simple: Make phone calls expensive again. Get rid of unlimited/free/super-cheap rates and make all callers pay by the minute again. Especially inbound international calls. Let people who want free communication use FaceTime and SMS and Email and whatnot. But make phone calls expensive enough that you know if someone is paying to call you it must be important. I got my first docu…
Your thoughts in light of that?
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Yes, receiving calls (and text messages) is free. (unless you are roaming and then you pay the international sector of the call) As far as I know this is true not just in Europe but everywhere outside of North America. It's certainly been true in the Asian countries I've been to (I get prepaid SIM cards everywhere I visit). It comes down to the numbering plans - in the NANP (north american numbering plan), landline a…
> In other countries, mobile phones have their own "mobile phones" area code which is non-geographic and applies to all mobile phones. Here in Brazil it's slightly different. The area codes are the same for fixed and cell phones, but if the first digit of the local part of the phone number is in the 7-9 range, it's a cell phone (if it's in the 2-6 range, it's a fixed phone; 1 is reserved for special services like eme…
In the European country I used to live in, they even had different mobile area codes per-operator, so you knew which mobile operator the person you were calling to was on. They would have deals where calling someone on the same operator was free. This got complicated when number portability was added (and the number of mobile phones increased)
One pattern I noticed but haven’t tried to circumvent yet is that I noticed robocalls identify on the caller ID as having the same area code as my normal phone number and my Google Voice number. If we were to acquire a phone number from say, some small town somewhere you have no business with, then could we block all caller ID with that area code and avoid all such robocalls?
I can’t imagine why anyone ever answers the phone. I get at least ten robocalls every weekday. I don’t ever look at my voicemail and I haven’t answered a call in ages. Edit: I know I’m not alone because CNN just released a poll with no responses from people under the age of fifty, because they couldn’t reach enough of them by phone.
If you’re talking about the CNN poll on Democratic Presidential candidates, then that’s a colossal mis-statement of the facts. They definitely did have people under 50 in the poll. There was a Facebook post making the rounds that took a single chart from the methodology statement and claimed that nobody under 50 was polled, incorrectly. I encourage you to read the full polling statement, available online, to see that…