Tuesday 30 July 2013

Any Telecoms "experts" out there?

Only having spotted "Regulators are to get more power to act against companies responsible, while cold callers will not be allowed to conceal their number - making reporting unwanted calls easier" in this BBC piece about Maria Miller's planned crackdown on "nuisance calls" I confess to not fully understanding how that would work.

A range of measures is being planned to tackle the issue of nuisance phone calls, the culture secretary has said.

Regulators are to get more power to act against companies responsible, while cold callers will not be allowed to conceal their number - making reporting unwanted calls easier.

A licensing system for call centres may also be introduced in the future.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) document, Connectivity, Content and Consumers: Britain's digital platform for growth, says the calls "can be live marketing calls, silent calls, abandoned calls and recorded marketing message calls".
"More often than not it is perceived as a nuisance, but it can also cause anxiety, inconvenience and distress," the report says.

The measures being taken also include lowering the threshold for number of calls before enforcement action is taken and allowing Ofcom and the Information Commissioner's Office to more easily share information.
There will also be clarification of the process for opting out of receiving marketing calls and reporting unwanted calls. 

4 comments:

View from the Solent said...

'.. while cold callers will not be allowed to conceal their number - making reporting unwanted calls easier" ... '
I confess to not fully understanding how that would work.

Your 'not fully understanding how that would work' is quite understandable. It can't.

Bayard said...

"while cold callers will not be allowed to conceal their number"

Well, most cold-callers are calling from outside the country, to bypass the TPS, and they couldn't have their number displayed, even if they wanted to.

Lola said...

Hate to invoke Godwin's Law so early on but really, this is so Nazi-ish isn't it?

Bayard said...

Another reason that this is a daft idea is that having spam callers conceal their number actually helps, because you know not to bother answering a concealed number call and I dare say, with modern electronic 'phones with different ringtones for different numbers, you could program them not to ring at all.