VANCOUVER – This week Telus officially launched Call Control, an new service the company says is an improvement on the CRTC’s best practices for call filtering services and universal call blocking.
Call control is a free feature available to home phone customers in B.C. and Alberta – and now to all wireless customers nationally which blocks the majority of autodialed calls from reaching customers.
The majority of nuisance calls, including scams, are generated by computer-dialers that enable spammers to dial many numbers at once and are normally unable to respond to the Call Control message. Of the first group of customers to have Call Control, Home Phone Subscribers in B.C. and Alberta, 93% of survey respondents said it did a good, very good, or excellent job at limiting nuisance calls, said the company in a release.
The new calling feature requires unknown callers to listen to a brief message and manually respond with a one-digit code, explains the release. For example, a first time dialer trying to connect to a Telus customer with the feature will be greeted with a brief message stating “this number has Call Control – to get through, please press 9.” The number is randomly generated. Once the digit is pressed, the call will connect.
Legitimate callers won’t need to respond to the prompt every time, because the system remembers numbers which passed the test.
It also allows customers to list up to 25 phone numbers on their accepted callers list, and up to 25 on their blocked callers list. Numbers on the accepted callers list will not hear the message or have to insert the one-digit code.
To activate the service, customers can sign into their online account, or dial *99 from their Telus phone.
For more, please click here.
