Its not the frequency that matters, it?s the nature of the calls. Some can be real emergencies that you don?t want to miss and by definition those are not likely to be frequent at all.
Even just a warning that power will be off for hours as they do maintenance on the system is useful to get even if uncommon.
The other obvious one is the power or water being out for hours because of work being done. It would be handy to know when and how long it will be out for so you can either be elsewhere if you need the power or water or not start something like a roast or baking a fruit cake or bread that will be ruined if the power goes out half way through the process.
We get a card through the letterbox for scheduled work. Much more reliable.
Tim
Not viable with the warning of an impending flood.
Back in the real world, how many times have a utility company phoned YOU to say that a service is going off? In 40 years they have phoned me zero times. The utility companies don't phone you when the service is about it go off. It will be more likely something like the fire brigade requesting power is switched off while they fight a fire, or some JCB driver has cut through a cable or road workers have set fire to the gas main. The utility company 'office' will have little idea when the service will be restored although they may set up an automatic answer if you phone them and a lot of people are asking the same question. When major work is planned you may get a snail mail saying the service will be interrupted at some unspecified time of day.
Some people may have a need to accept certain calls and filtering the junk may be more difficult but I guess that for most people a simple universal filter will block most junk cold calling especially as many modern systems are smarter than just dropping calls.
Doesn't common sense tell you if the weather forecast tells you there is rain at certain times of year you look on a flood web site.
rod speed does not have any sense.
That's fine if the work is scheduled. But, when a builder two doors down the road manages to short out the electricity feeder, as happened here 2 summers ago, you won't get any notice.
[Snip] but when I've phoned to query a loss of supply, I have been rung back with an estimated time of restoration.
True call works well, but the issue is that often they do not show any number. I find this is often true of councils, NHS etc, so really there is nothing one can do about this. With the widespread use of such devices due to the failure of the telephone pref service to stop rubbish callers, its going to be up to the organisations to at least use a known number for the star or whit list. This is my opinion. I am aware its becoming an increasing problem for large companies who do not show a number. The ball is in their court and their records should show that there were issues with the calls to some numbers by their short duration and hence flag up them to call you with a human or send you a letter in my view.
Alternatively, you could just give them only a mobile number but increasingly, there are junk texts and calls coming into those as well. I think even the services operated by companies like bt have the same problem with automated calls. I do not know the answer unless they only allow the message to play if your end is asked to hit a # key or something, then they would know which calls failed. Brian
In theory, if the company or organisation wishes to call, it should be no problem to always show the same number. After all the scammers and telesales people seem to manage to do this even if its a totally fictitious number. In my view its sheer laziness on the part of the organisation who cannot be bothered to set up a number to display. Brian
If anybody wants to see how these devices work,look up true call and see.I amvery happy with my staand alon device as its totally blind friendly and controlled from the phone itself, it has white and black lists. I understand there is a recent update to require a hash be typed to thwart pr recorded messages which try to fool the devices. You can even ask the caller to enter their pin if you only want certain people to get through on a number. brian
Depends on what you class as masked, the beekeeper who turned up to remove some bees arrived dressed in his kit as he only had to walk from a few hundred yards away but then I was expecting him, just as some people will be expecting a phone call from a Council or health centre . Telling them to f*ck off is your right as long you don't later whinge that you haven't been given an appointment or no body from the council has arranged to see you about some issue that you may have brought to their attention. You arn't really important enough to be treated any different to anyone else and they will just move on an give the appointment or arrange to see someone else who is easier to contact.
G.Harman
However, they don't choose to do that and I can't force them to, so I have to accept private number calls for them to get through.
I put them into a menu with a 'get through' option. Works fine.
I disagree - we have previously had calls from the water and power suppliers warning that they are about to begin work on the network which might/will affect us. Obviously without a crystal ball, they can only warn us when it is a sudden planned outage, but that is better than no warning or guessing how long we will be off for.
If I had a highly infectious disease and an ambulance turned up and masked men jumped out, I'd open the door to them alright.
10 per day? I doubt we've had 10, ever. And other than being XD, witholding CLI and being on the TPS, we don't take any special precautions.
How do you put a withheld number into a whitelist?
But you may find one day that your number does appear on a freely circulated list and you may find that junk calls rise significantly.
The phone's log shows I've had 29 calls in the past 2 weeks where the caller has chosen to hang up when presented with a message.
Once on a 'list' the TPS is a complete waste of time. It doesn't consider International calls to be part of its remit even though they are all on behalf of UK based companies.
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