Tuesday 30 January 2018

A change of phone...

We have been thinking about this one for a while now and finally decided to take the plunge when the one we were looking at, dropped £20 off its price in the January sale! We chose a BT8610.

Yes, we know that cordless phones don't work in a power cut due to their base stations not having their own electricity supply (design rethink to allow a battery?). Also, during a power cut, despite the handset having batteries, the date and time have to be reset - again, very odd. We are keeping the old one for a power cut, just in case.

Until we took advantage of BT's nuisance call service (free as we are their customers), we were receiving up to 15 calls a week. We managed to block them and also don't allow witheld or international calls through at all. However, once your limit of 100 blocks is reached, you are stuffed unless you pay, or else have to physically remove some.

Our new phone has Truecall technology on it. Meaning when anyone except your allowed contacts get in touch, the phone answers (like an operator) and people have to give their name. It then rings us and plays the message. If we don't want to accept we push the refuse button or block them - simples.

Most cold calling agencies aren't happy to leave their name from what I can gather when said 'operator' kicks in unless they are from say the hospital, who use odd numbers, or an official company such as HMRC etc.

Should someone get a new mobile or landline, they too will have to go through this vetting procedure until we add them to our contact list. This new phone also allows us to block 1000 numbers.

Being wireless it has a small amount of interference on it but also can be used handless (speaker phone), which we may use if said mild interference becomes annoying.

6 comments:

  1. Sounds like a brilliant solution.

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  2. We have our phone through vonage - is over the internet. No payment for a line rental needed. Unlimited UK calls and the vast majority of international calls. In almost three years we haven’t received one cold call (think this is because it is an unusual number). Has voice mail and send an email with the voice mail transcribed, if it can understand the person. One friend uses what he thinks is an English accent and the system cannot understand him, so we get a wave file with his message. You can access the voicemail the usual way but the email is useful if you are out of town. Can also download an app to you phone so you can access your vonage line if you are connected to wifi. All this for about £15 a month. Good value for us as we have no need for a BT line rental.

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    Replies
    1. Our phone calls are less than £7 a quarter. We use a lot of internet and streaming, so need a good amount of broadband.

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  3. Our phone is an addition to our broadband. We pay about £30 a month for phone and broadband. 120gig a month broadband, free between midnight and 06:00 for downloading.no BT line rental.

    Only downside is that if you have a power cut there is no phone.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks. Does that mean you pay to download between 0600 and midnight?

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  4. Don’t pay per se, it comes out of our allowance of 120 gig

    ReplyDelete

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