Landlines can be familiar, reliable and provide high-quality service, but the technology hasn’t always kept up. That’s why today, we’re introducing Fiber Phone as a new option to help you stay connected wherever you are.
Following the link, I see
Privacy controls like spam filtering, call screening and do-not-disturb make sure the right people can get in touch with you at the right time.
Spam filtering for phone calls. Verizon refuses to give that to me. The most they will do is filter 10 numbers. I get spam phone calls from more than 10 numbers in less than 48 hours.
Google does not have its fiber service in my neighborhood. But I would pay up for the spam filtering service if they could somehow provide it.
Google Fiber is mostly just a threat Google uses to negotiate with the cable cos/PR for net neutrality. It has no intention to ever build it out.
Spam filtering for an arbitrary number of known phone numbers is trivially easy to implement for any modern telco. That Verizon won’t do it speaks to their disinterest/pseudo-monopoly, rather than any technical challenge for a provider like Google.
Google voice has the spam-filtering built in. It’s not a conventional number, but a forwarding number, however – so you’d forward a google voice number to conventional landlines and/or cellphones. Ideally, the way you use it is that you port the number everyone knows to google voice, then get a cellphone/landline with a new (unlisted) number, which you forward GV to. Then you keep giving out the GV number, can use filtering to have some callers forwarded, some sent to voicemail, and spam callers get a “this number has been disconnected” message.
This is exactly what I do. The only downside was the new number recently belonged to someone with a lot of debt collectors calling them.
I’ve enjoyed the spam filtering that I get with the Ooma phone service, not to mention the price. Some still slip through, but far fewer than when I was on the landline.
I switched my landline to a VOIP service called ‘Callcentric’ years ago. It’s been great for me. Really cheap. Lets me block unwanted calls. Voice mails are sent to me as email attachments. Setting up the VOIP box initially require a little technical messing around, but that’s been the only drawback.