311–320 of 432 posts
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Yup. It’s amusing to see people think there is some hard technical problem here. Tie the problem of robocalls to the telcos losing money, and this problem will solve itself in months.
I got two unwanted robocalls in the last twenty years (central europe). This seems like a profoundly american issue.
I enabled the Silence Unknown Callers feature [0] in iOS and haven’t answered a spam call since. The downside is that it sends every call from unknown numbers to voicemail, including legitimate ones. It’s a worthwhile trade-off. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207099
I tried it, and within a week I missed an important call. I was waiting by the phone, and it just never arrived. I realized too late that it had been silenced. It's very frustrating that we can't just get something like a spam filter, rather than a blanket "silence everything unknown."
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>> Stop allowing spoofed numbers. Period. > As someone with a heavy background, it would break a fair bit of the PSTN As it stands, I think quite a few consumers are ready to just walk away from PSTN unless something pretty drastic is done quite soon.
Raises hand. If they still made an iPod like device that ONLY included data, I'd switch to it today. I can get my calls via any of the various online services. As it stands, my phone is in do not disturb mode so that only calls in my address book get through.
I previously thought of this as something old people do because they can't type on a phone, but I tried it, and it does provide a more rapid, conversational way of creating text.
I would love it if smartphones were offered with the option to opt out of a legacy phone number, and instead just a data plan. most of the calls I receive are marking or pure attempts at fraud.
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What about returning a call? do you dial your sip number and input the number you want to be connected to? I think calling folks back from a number different than what they dialed to reach me.. might defeat the purpose. Thanks for sharing your setup.
That is an option - the other thing you can do is get a Softphone app on your phone and log into the service with it. They work with text messages as well. That is the one downside of this is now having two numbers to deal with. I was getting so many garbage calls though, the trade off has been worth it.
A lot of people point out that telecom companies should do something but aren't because it's lucrative for them or too expensive to fix. Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves with this in the long term? People will stop using phone numbers altogether. Using the phone has become such a pain, at least in the US, that whenever I can, I used different ways of communicating. WhatsApp, iM…
"Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves" After seeing cable companies fail to get into the internet, I'm convinced companies try to stop progress instead of embracing it. They don't see progress as an opportunity, but rather as a threat. They don't realize how much they are hurting themselves. I read an interesting article on here about the rise of the cell phone camera, the amount o…
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I think the major fault with this reasoning is that the exact same solution has been proposed many times for e-mail, going back decades, and has never come even close to catching on. I think that applying a cost - whether time or money - to producing phone calls would fail for the same reasons. Namely, the significant difficulty in making significant changes to the telephone system (e.g. changing requirements to make…
You do know that people used to have to pay per call, right? There was even something called long distance charges ! Free, unlimited phone calls is a fairly recent thing. This is not a technical problem at all.
In other words: yes, and many people also paid for their email accounts for some years. Yet here we are...
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Is there a reason the FCC can't fine the telecoms for allowing the illegal calls? My guess is they'd fix the problem pretty quick.
Telecoms aren't responsible for who uses their service, or what they do on it—thats why they are classified as a utility.
It feels super reasonable to ask for telecoms to blacklist stuff after complaints
A lot of people point out that telecom companies should do something but aren't because it's lucrative for them or too expensive to fix. Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves with this in the long term? People will stop using phone numbers altogether. Using the phone has become such a pain, at least in the US, that whenever I can, I used different ways of communicating. WhatsApp, iM…
Why would it make you more or less likely to stay loyal? Phone numbers are already portable, so you don't need to stay loyal currently.
What I meant to say is that, right now, my provider is the one who has substantial control over my main id of communication, i.e. phone number. This adds additional friction to move to a different provider, but also move across borders and so on. As my way of communicating moves onto other services, the telcos do not control my id anymore. Everything becomes easier and less friction. For example, if I could, I would probably buy a data plan from one telco and a phone number from another, and I would experiment with my data much more, shop around etc.