Any Rumors Yet on Call Blocking Feature?

Posts: 448 · Posted: Thu Jan 20, 2011 10:03 am Post subject:

Lane555 wrote:

3. Telemarketing pays Vonage NOT to add selective call blocking....

When I started this thread in 2007, I never would have believed selective call blocking would still be vaporware in 2011. Who knows if Vonage is being paid by 3rd parties NOT to offer it, but I'm confident the feature's absence is NOT for technical reasons.

This year marks my 7th year as a Vonage customer, although I'm down to 3 lines now. Their customer service people are a nightmare, but service and reliability has been very good in recent years-- after a rocky few years at first.

From my perspective, Vonage has sacrificed essential features (like call blocking) in favor of developing glitzy "wow" features for bragging rights, which most customers probably don't even use.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 29, 2011 Posts: 1

After years of going without call blocking, I decided to get Google Voice. Being from Canada, this required using Hide-My-Ip to present a U.S. IP number to Google, or I would not have been able to get a number. Google Voice does not accept Canadian numbers, so I got a Vonage virtual number. I needed a SECOND U.S. number so that I could configure it to call my phone when friends called. Again, as Google does not support 'foreign' numbers, this required me to subscribe to another service, because Vonage doesn't allow virtual numbers to forward, you have to buy a second POTS line. The service I chose was one from Toktumi.com.

With anonymous call blocking turned on in Google, I can now selectively block numbers. It is not an elegant or cheap solution. People who I do want to talk to will be forwarded to my cell in a convoluted path of Vonage > Google > Toktumi > my cell.

The problem is, when I am at home, I still have to listen to the phone ring for unwanted calls, because I still have to run to the phone to see if it is friend before it goes to voicemail or is blocked. Vonage forwarding still rings the phone even on 'Instant,' my phone should not ring, just as with the Vonage Call Blocking or Do Not Disturb feature. There just needs to be an API to allow pre-processing and reporting numbers.

Calling parties are now wise to caller-id spoofing, so they can simply change their caller ID to any number not on my block list, then they get a voicemail prompt instead of "this number is no longer in service." This cat and mouse game of manually adding numbers to block reminds me of junk fax calls where a fax would first have to waste many pages of expensive thermal paper, then that number would have to be added to a block list. (Faxes could not block anonymous calls.)

I have been subscribed to Vonage since 2005, no complaints. The occassional complaint from people I talk to is my voice quality on their side is very poor, meaning my provider sometimes has slow outgoing internet speeds.

So what I want as a customer if you don't want to lose me to a company that WILL provide a POTS line with no-ring is:

- a Block-All unknown calls within a set time frame
- a no-ring on the POTS line, but a real-time pop-up on the computer (or iPhone) that shows an incoming call attempt.
- Customized messages for blocked callers that tell them why they are being blocked.
- An option to forward blocked callers to a very expensive pay-per-call service to discourage future attempts (better yet, I get paid every time a blocked caller phones)
- Google-like voice transcription
- Abiling to change outgoing caller ID spoofing. Currently I use a service that charges $10 for 60 minutes. Ideally, I would like to do a three-way call, so the 'spoof' call phone dials, a second number is joined in, then the originating phone quickly disconnected so the minutes for call-spoofing stop accumulating, and the call continues on the other line.