call blocker device suggestions?

You are asking for the impossible.

Trolls don't ever experience compassion. It's all about how being superior to everyone else. Until they are affected personally, they prove their superiority by looking down on everyone else.

For an education on medical costs I suggest you do a web search for 'chargemaster rates'. IMHO, health insurance is the largest criminal activity in this country! Bring down the cost of health care and start your very own savings account to pay. And I'm not referring to a HSA that only addresses the premiums you have paid to a ripoff company but to your own acc't. Need an example? Here's mine.. Back in sep'07 I spent 4 days in the hospital for congestive heart failure and got a bill for a little over 10K. Went to pay it and asked for a deal as I know they used the chargemaster. Lady says if you pay within a month you get a 33% cut. Ok, give me a number. Wrote a check for the amount to pay in full. She says 'don't you wish you had ins. to pay it'? No! ???? Why? Because I could have continued ins. from the company that shut down our shop and I could have kept the policy and so far I would have paid them 18K with a 5K deductible. So I would have paid out 23K and the ins. co. would have paid 2K! Nuff said.... Now I'm retired and on medicare. pdk

When you're at home, put your cell phone on call forwarding to your landline.

Verizon digital also has a spot where you can enter up to (10?) phone numbers to block. You don't even get one ring.

The works if you want to be rid of an ex-wife or girlfriend. The telemarketers use different numbers very often and you really don't get a lot of repeats.

That sounds pretty reasonable for 4 days in the hospital. I've seen bills for $2500 for just an ER visit for a couple hours. And the problem with the strategy is that you were very lucky. What if it had turned into say a bypass operation and a bill for $100K? Or a long term illness that runs up huge bills for hospitals, drugs, etc?

"trader_4" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com...

Like I pointed out earlier. Do a web search for: 'chargemaster rates' And who declared that I _must_ accept treatment? It should be a choice. Tough choice, yes, but .....

Get an android app. that does it (free). forward the whielisted calls to your home phone

On Tue, 31 Mar 2015 20:36:06 -0400, "Phil Kangas" wrote in

And I would argue that there are many contenders for largest criminal group.

Is it the sugar/grain/carbohydrate food industry?

Is it the pharmaceutical industry?

Or health care providers?

Or the idiots that eat McJunkFood?

Or the insurance companies that are expected to pay for all the above criminal activities?

After reading all of the suggestions here, this unit is what I decided on except version 2 because it looks like I can add numbers manually. I still have some questions about it though that perhaps you can answer:

To all others here who have provided suggestions: much appreciated but there have been issues with some of the recommendations. For one, I don't have any cells or android operating phones, so those apps wouldn't have helped. Also, the website that screens the unwanted callers is not available for my area. Verizon block is apparently only available as an extra monthly charge, which I sure didn't want to add as I just dropped two unnecessary extras recently. Unfortunately, my cordless Uniden phones don't have the ability to block calls on their own. So that meant either changing my number and/or getting a private number which costs, or upgrading to FIOS which I definitely didn't want to do, getting rid of Verizon altogether and going with someone else or getting an inbound device that would do the screening job. I chose the latter both due to the simplicity, cost and convenience. Now I'll see if I made the right decision. There was another device I looked at first called the Teleblocker, which didn't even need caller id, but it is not being made anymore and I wanted something still manufactured and could be returned if problems or doesn't work like I want it to.

Thanks to all, Bill

Thanks, but this doesn't seem to work for me anymore. I have been registered for years, then re-registered and yet again to no avail. Most of the calls I'm getting are not legitimate and probably aren't even in the country, so the DNC doesn't apply. For the first several years I had it though it worked great.

Not without an additional monthly charge which, being on limited income, I just recently dropped some services to save on monthly rate.

I don't care if I'm rude or not anymore. The way I look at it, they KNOW they're not supposed to be calling and if they do then they get what they deserve. 90% of the time there's no one on the other end anyway anymore.

Hi Bill,

In theory, it should at least be stopping the legitimate calls.

If you already have high-speed internet, you may want to look into an internet phone provider. I only pay $20 a month for 1-VOIP service. That includes 500 minutes free long distance in US and Canada, caller ID, voice mail that can email my messages to me, and of course a variety of call blocking services. There are additional included features I don't even use.

Verizon used to charge us close to $100 a month for basic phone service, no caller ID, and virtually every call was long distance.

Take care,

Anthony Watson

I don't know what Verizon is doing there, but here in NJ, if you have cable TV, internet and phone, the phone winds up less than the typical Verizon copper phone bill, which is ~$50 a month here. The effective rate for VOIP FIOS phone I think is more like $30, so I don't see why moving to that would be more expensive. Even if you have the lowest cost, metered copper service, that's probably >$20 a month. They have the pricing set to encourage people to move to VOIP.

Or you could do what I previously suggested, but an Ooma and get rid of Verizon phone. The Ooma is about $100 new, cheaper on Ebay. And after that, you only pay fees and taxes which are about $3.75 a month. For an additional $10/mth, Ooma premier gives you all kinds of call blocking, call forwarding and similar features.

Getting 10 hangups a day is not normal, not in my experience and I don't think I'd try to bandaid it. If I was having 10 hangup calls a day, I'd go to Ooma, get a new number, problem solved and cost is down to $3.75 a month. Unless of course having a different number is a big burden for some reason.

And to those saying this happens a lot, with any new number, etc, not in my experience. In the last 18 months I tried MajicJack, Nettalk, and now have Ooma. Had different numbers with all of them and not a single hangup type call. I'm sure it's possible, that you could get a bad number, but it hasn't happened to me.

What are you paying Verizon every month now?

Now I'll see if I

Per HerHusband:

And we pay zero per month (and something like 2.5 or 3 cents a minute)... so it can be even cheaper.

The options are so many and the service so reliable that I am periodically tempted to go over to VOIP 100%.

Right now I just use it for all non-800/non-911 outgoing calls and have been reluctant to port our number to the VOIP provider because of perceived inferiority of VOIP access to the 911 system.

They really need to implement some kind of test capability for

There should be some protocol where you could do a test call once a year or similar. Even if it was automated somehow within the system, so that it didn't ring just echoed back where the call went, what the far end got for info, etc would be a big confirmation.

Yes, caller ID still works. I have an announcing "base" on my system too and it says the incoming phone number.

If it's like mine there will be one ring even for blacklisted numbers. For it to receive and decode the caller ID info it seems like it winds up having to let one ring thru. However, I'm running mine in parallel with the rest of my phones. I think you can insert it in series in which case it might not send anything thru, and hence no ringing, unless it's actually allowing the call to get thru. It depends a bit on how you want to set up your answering machine and where you want to put it and where you have your wires running, etc as to whether it can be set up parallel versus serially. I didn't want to rearrange a whole bunch of my phone stuff to do the serial setup so I just stuck it on an open jack.

There's a timing diagram here for Caller ID. Packet burst is after the first ring.

Gotta love student projects.

Paul

Seems like it would have been better to send the caller ID burst first. Any idea why they didn't?