One thing SkypeIn can't do: block telemarketers
For me I have two SkypeIn phone numbers, one in San Francisco (CA) and another one in Melbourne (Australia).
Now, these work great and only a couple of people know my number in San Francisco - only people that needed to contact me for a conference call or two.
Skype should actually offer these numbers here in New Zealand as well.
But I digress. Last night we got a phone call at 3:45am. Some telemarketer, with a foreign accent, not American, not New Zealander, was calling my SkypeIn phone number for a survey.
For a damn survey at 3:45am.
Right. So I think I should join the United States Do Not Call Registry. I don't even live there, but I will have to. The problem you see, is that there's no geographical or time zone limitation when you have a SkypeIn number. For those inconsiderate telemarketing companies, they think it's fair game, being a U.S. number and being day over there.
How did they get hold of this phone number? Was it a random dialing exercise? "Let's just call all numbers in the SFO area, it's daytime there after all..."
If you want to register your SkypeIn number in this list then visit their official website for the United States Do Not Call Registry.
Of course another problem is that SkypeIn numbers are assigned by Skype, and their terms of service says that they may even take or change the number at their will, depending on how much you use it.
What if when you buy a SkypeIn number you get a "gift", a number that have been already sent to hundreds of telemarketing companies? What a pain that would be.
We need something like a "flag" that will tell telemarketing companies to not call Skype numbers. Something that uniquely identify a number as a virtual number, therefore let those people know that they may be disturbing someone in the middle of the night, on the other side of the world.
And no, logging off Skype during the night is not an option. I don't unplug my phone from the landline every evening before going to bed. Why should I log off of Skype?
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Comment by Grant17, on 4-JAN-2007 14:02
I have a VoIP number which is publicised on our web site and if I leave my phone switched on overnight, invariably some AMERICAN will call it at 3am or 5am or any time they damn-well please. Americans don't seem to have grasped the concept that there are other time zones in the world where people are asleep while they are working.
Needless to say, I don't want to receive such calls, so I have this plug called an "Anti-American Plug" which diverts my phone to an answering machine.
This is the only solution I know of to this problem, other than having a more intelligent PABX that can do this automatically every night. Now there's an idea...
Comment by Brenda, on 4-JAN-2007 16:56
set a cron job (or whatever it's called in windows) to put the volume low after midnight, and back up at 6am...
What you really want is enum.
Comment by Joseph Bloom, on 5-JAN-2007 00:24
The do not call list does not apply to surveys!!!
All you can do is ask the interviewer who calls you to be removed from their calling list. Keep in mind that there are hundreds if not thousands of survey firms.
Comment by Jessicca, on 8-FEB-2007 02:41
Hello,
You mention the dualphone you use with Skype. Am I understanding correctly that you don't have to have the computer on and Skype running to receive SkypeIn or make Skypeout calls when you have this phone?
Thank you for your help,
Jessicca
Comment by andrew, on 29-NOV-2007 20:52
Well it appears someone can block DTMF tones from landlines into a skypeIn number at least here in NZ that is.
I was trying to change my music on SpeakMediaPro via my cordless phone via skypIn and to my surprise SpeakMediaPro couldn't identify the DTMF tone as it wasn't getting one. So I could hardly "say it to play it" because the Speech Recognition engine wouldn't activate as it needs to hear a 5 so it can pause the music and activate the ASR where you just tell it to play whatever you want.
I thought I'd broken something but then I got a few calls from other users saying the same thing that it wasn't working. So after spending a day testing it I came to the conclusion that the DTMF is being filtered out and I'm not kidding the DTMF tones are being filtered out. All I get is a chirp then silence, perhaps its due to a monopolistic telco that doesn't like that people could side step their network to place toll calls. I doubt I'd have to name names and I wouldn't be surprised if they'd stoop to filtering out the tones to thwart would be users of SkypeIn redirecting calls, Skype doesn't recognize dial tones from a landline but then its not hard to do or write an application using Skype that'd answer a skypeIn call and let a user dial an international number and have skype transfer the call.
I doubt Skype would do it, so it doesn't really leave many choices!
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Comment by sbiddle, on 4-JAN-2007 09:16
Telemarketers are a huge problem in oz as well, we almost have to be thankful that the problem doesn't seem to be as bad in NZ.
While my girlfriends parents were over here for Xmas I had their Melbourne phone number diverted to my Melbourne VoIP number so they could answer calls in NZ without having to pay huge costs diverting it to their roaming mobile. The result was at last 1 Indian telemarketers ringing every night, something that is apparently the norm in Australia. Looking into it further 2 of these callers representing large companies also had their CID spoofed to an Australian phone number for the head office/call centre for these companies as to get around people who don't answer calls with no CID! Very cunning indeed..
I'm just glad they don't have my Melbourne number! :-)