BT to launch ‘breakthrough’ junk voicemail service
Telecoms giant BT is to mount a fresh crackdown on nuisance calls made via landlines after developing ‘breakthrough’ technology which will allow it to divert as many as 25m unwanted calls a week to a junk voicemail box.
The free service will be made available to all customers after BT invested in expanded processing power to identify black-listed numbers offering PPI claims or other marketing messages in real-time and thus redirect them from unwitting customers.
People will also be able to nominate entire categories of calls; such as international or withheld numbers, which they do not wish to receive.
John Petter, chief executive of BT Consumer, said: “Nuisance calls are one of the great annoyances of modern life. Everyone will have received one. We are delighted to have made this major breakthrough. We are giving control of the landline back to our customers and removing a major hassle and grief for millions of customers.
“We are doing our bit. We call on other providers to up their game in the fight against this menace. They can help us to root out the malicious players they may be hosting on their own networks when we identify dodgy and suspicious calling behaviour.”
Nuisance calls have been a spiralling problem for BT with recent research by Which? indicating that three quarters of all customers receive at least one unsolicited call each month but the provider is confident that its new proactive approach will ‘drastically’ reduce these figures.
BT will share its information with Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office to improve enforcement action.