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by walrus01 2886 days ago
I have done this. I have my own VoIP system. One of my DIDs picks up and is a recording of me saying "I'm screening my calls for telemarketers and scams. enter code 5300 any time to be connected to $myname". If 5300 is entered, it dials out to the DID for my cellphone and transfers the call. No code, or no action, call goes nowhere.

You can fairly easily make the code whatever you want or make it a multi step process.
2 comments
swandog46 2886 days ago
Did you find a way to do this that didn't require paying per-minute to (e.g.) Twilio for the call forwarding back to your cell phone?
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walrus01 2886 days ago
I do pay per minute in 6 second increments but the price is so small to be barely noticeable.
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swandog46 2886 days ago
Really? You end up having to pay per minute for the entire duration of every forwarded (non-spam) inbound phone call...
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walrus01 2886 days ago
Yes, costs average less than $6 a month. Wholesale SIP termination and origination is remarkably cheap if you are dealing with the US48 states and Canada.

I believe I'm at something like 6/10ths of 1 cent per minute.

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swandog46 2886 days ago
Yes, that's about right. It's just a matter of whether you're willing to pay $6/month for this. :)
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SOLAR_FIELDS 2886 days ago
$6 a month is more than a fair price for me to eliminate robocalls; I receive about 5-10 on average in any given day.

The collateral damage are systems that have you mark your place in line and call you back. It seems like these could be manually whitelisted though with some ingenuity.

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SOLAR_FIELDS 2886 days ago
If I remember correctly from the conversation I mentioned above: this is only implementable yourself with a VOIP solution and not an actual phone line?
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tremon 2886 days ago
As long as you have a programmable PBX with POTS support (e.g. Asterisk with a telephony expansion card [1]), you can do this with landlines too.

[1] https://www.asterisk.org/products/telephony-interface-cards

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walrus01 2886 days ago
I really recommend against introducing analog anything into a modern VoIP system in 2018. Better to port your landline's DID to a VoIP service and route it from there. If you need a physical landline looking phone, good quality sip desk phones are $50 (assuming you don't care about huge color screens).
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supertrope 2886 days ago
Definitely. End-to-end digital is best for fidelity and reliability. Running your own PBX is another point of failure for a service most people expect very high uptime out of, and opens you up to toll fraud. It's only worth it if you have a lot of phone or want call recording or transferring.
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