UK telecoms provider BT to launch service to block nuisance calls

UK telecoms provider BT is launching a service for customers to help block nuisance calls from cold callers. According to the company, it was going to divert nuisance calls to a junk voicemail inbox rather than reaching home phone lines.

According to the telecoms giant, the service would divert around 25 million unwanted calls per week.

Customers too would have the ability to blacklist certain phone numbers from calling them, in addition to nominating whole categories of calls they wanted to avoid, such as international calls or withheld numbers.

BT did not provide an exact date when the new feature would launch, but it did say that the rollout would happen towards the end of this year.

The service would be available to only BT landline customers; the service would not be available to people with business or mobile accounts.

According to BT it would be able to provide the feature by harnessing "huge computing power to analyse large amounts of live data."

"This analysis will enable network experts at BT's centre in Oswestry to identify rogue numbers – typically those that make enormous numbers of calls – and to add them to a BT blacklist. This proactive intervention will drastically reduce the number of such calls customers receive."

According to consumer group Which?, UK users were plagued by 75 million annoying phone calls each month.

Petter said, "We have been at the forefront of equipping our customers to defend themselves against the flow of PPI and unwanted marketing calls that has become a flood in recent years.

"Now we are able to announce that we are working to identify and tackle huge numbers of those calls in the network."

Petter was also calling on BT's competitors, including TalkTalk and Sky, to introduce similar services  to stop spam phone calls once and for all.