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#81
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
On 6/22/2016 8:49 AM, nospam wrote:
In article , PeterN wrote: These days, so few people I know ever call me on my home phone rather than the cell phone. When my home phone rings, I can assume it's a marketer and I'd be right 95% of the time. Even having my number on the "Do not call" list doesn't stop the marketers. The do not call list is a waste. I would not be surprised if that list was hacked and used for those robo calls. it's not a total waste because if you tell a spammer to not call and they call again, they may be subject to penalties, assuming you can figure out who they are. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/medi...ll-registry/en forcement The FTC takes aggressive legal action to make sure telemarketers abide by the Do Not Call Registry. To date, the Commission has brought 105 enforcement actions against companies and telemarketers for Do Not Call, abandoned call, robocall and Registry violations. The Mortgage Investors litigation produced the largest settlement for Do Not Call violations, resulting in civil penalty payments of $7.5 million. To date, 80 of these FTC enforcement actions have been resolved, and in those cases the agency has recovered over $41 million in civil penalties and $33 million in redress or disgorgement. They claim to be aggressive. there are some good people there, but they are hindered by lack of adequate funding. The way to enforce is simple. With the consent of appropriate enforcement agencies, authorize civilian sting operations. -- PeterN |
#82
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
On 6/21/2016 4:25 PM, nospam wrote:
In article , PAS wrote: Before I switched to Ooma from CenturyLink, and ported the number, I never got junk calls. Afterwards, I was flooded with them. I've seen that some people believe that CenturyLink sells phone number to marketers when people leave, and I also wonder if Ooma does something along those lines to get people to pay the extra $10/month for their service that allows you to block calls. I went the cheapest way because all I wanted was to keep the number, instead of having to tell everyone a new one. I really have no use for the number otherwise, but I'm still too cheap to pay the $10 to block calls. I did have it on the free trial period, and it works very well. pay to block calls??? There are additional packages you can purchase for Ooma service. Blocking calls with Ooma is via NoMoreRobo and that is part of an additional $10.00/month package. With Ooma, you buy the device and don't pay for a monthly service except for a couple of government fees/surcharges that for me amounted to abotu $3.00 per month. My device cost me $80.00, for the basic service it would cost me about $36.00 per year. doesn't ooma require their own device? Yes, they require their own device. I had walked past it many times in Costco over the years. After checking into it, I decided to buy one. I'm quite satisfied with it. I've got it plugged into the house wiring and use my home phones, I don't use one of Ooma's handsets. i use voip.ms, which works with any standard ata device (i use two obihai atas), any standard voip phone and/or any of a number of sip apps on a smartphone or computer. each number is 85c/mo and includes a ****load of features, including call filtering, call screening (press 1 to be connected), multiple extensions (each room can be a separate extension), automated attendants (press 1 for sales, 2 for support..), call queues, multiple voicemail inboxes, custom forwarding, extensive call logs and a ****load more i don't remember offhand. another very good choice is callcentric, which has an easier to use interface but not as flexible. for my use patterns, the price was also a little higher. anveo is another reasonable choice but they have some odd restrictions that i did not like and a weird way to configure forwarding and queues. |
#83
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
On 6/21/2016 6:36 PM, nospam wrote:
In article , Bill W wrote: pay to block calls??? There are additional packages you can purchase for Ooma service. Blocking calls with Ooma is via NoMoreRobo and that is part of an additional $10.00/month package. With Ooma, you buy the device and don't pay for a monthly service except for a couple of government fees/surcharges that for me amounted to abotu $3.00 per month. My device cost me $80.00, for the basic service it would cost me about $36.00 per year. doesn't ooma require their own device? i use voip.ms, which works with any standard ata device (i use two obihai atas), any standard voip phone and/or any of a number of sip apps on a smartphone or computer. each number is 85c/mo and includes a ****load of features, including call filtering, call screening (press 1 to be connected), multiple extensions (each room can be a separate extension), automated attendants (press 1 for sales, 2 for support..), call queues, multiple voicemail inboxes, custom forwarding, extensive call logs and a ****load more i don't remember offhand. another very good choice is callcentric, which has an easier to use interface but not as flexible. for my use patterns, the price was also a little higher. anveo is another reasonable choice but they have some odd restrictions that i did not like and a weird way to configure forwarding and queues. Well this sucks. I wish I would have known about this when I bought the Ooma. 1 cent per minute, 85 cents monthly charge, plus taxes. there are no taxes. they're based in canada which means there isn't even a requirement for e911, assuming you're ok with that. if you want e911, it's $1.50/mo extra (a good idea if it's your *only* line, less so if you have alternatives). callcentric requires e911 and includes it in most of their plans, which start at 1.95/mo. they're based in new york and will also charge any applicable taxes. callcentric has a spam probability rating system, a bit like email spam ratings, so you could filter out high risk calls and let through low risk calls. voip.ms has said it's on their list of things to do. I wouldn't save much over the Ooma, but I would get all of the features missing in the basic Ooma account. there's *way* more features than most people need and configuring it is not always straightforward, but once set up it's fine. there's a huge wiki for reference. some features do cost extra, such as virtual fax, because it captures the fax and sends it to you via email, or you can email your fax to them (as an attachment) and it will be sent to the specified number. you can always use your own fax machine for no additional cost (other than per minute fees, if any). How well does using a fax machine work with this service, I wonder. Faxing over a "Regular" VOIP line is not reliable. I've been able to send some faxes but I cannot receive any. It was the same with my two prior VOIP services, even worse in one case where I couldn't even send a fax. I don't think it will work with the Ooma device, though. probably not, but an ata is cheap. $30-40 on ebay for a cheap one, slightly more for a decent one and under $100 for new. How is the sound quality, and overall performance? no complaints at all. there's actually two call quality tiers, value and premium. normal calls go over the premium tier, while outbound 800#s use the value tier for no cost. you can optionally set it to use the premium tier for 800# calls, but that will cost the standard per minute rate. i haven't had a problem with the value tier when making 800 calls so i see no reason to change. browse https://voip.ms and http://www.callcentric.com (as well as the others) and see which one best fits your needs. you can sign up for no cost and even make test calls to sip#s. as i said, callcentric has an easier to use interface and not quite as flexible while voip.ms is feature packed and more for power users. |
#84
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
On 6/21/2016 8:51 PM, PeterN wrote:
On 6/21/2016 2:23 PM, PAS wrote: On 6/20/2016 7:58 PM, Ken Hart wrote: On 06/20/2016 02:46 PM, Tony Cooper wrote: On Mon, 20 Jun 2016 09:31:05 -0400, nospam wrote: In article , Tony Cooper wrote: | In my case, a place less civilized: Florida. | | This time of year we can expect power outages every couple of weeks. | Usually it's everyone in the grid turning on their air conditioners at | the same time and it blows a fuse or whatever it is that regulates the | power. | I didn't realize there were places in the US with such bad service. Not that I would see that as a reason to pay the phone company to answer my phone, but I am surprised. We've never paid the phone company for voicemail retention. We've always had an answering machine. We have cordless phones and the base station has a recorder built-in. I'm not sure you can buy cordless phone system without a recorder in the base station. Maybe so, but a single station and base with recorder is about $25, so who'd not include it? a quick check of current models shows that you need to pay about double that to get an answering machine. Take longer: http://www.techforless.com/cgi-bin/tech4less/CS6124 In the old days, the answering machine used tapes, but now they have a permanent disk. there is no disk. it's flash memory. As you so often say, "Who cares what's under the hood?" My first answering machine was rented from the phone company, United Telephone (South-central Pennsylvania). At that time, you had 3 (legal) choices for answering machines: (1) rent from the telco, (2) have a "protective coupler" installed by the telco, and pay rent on that, (3) use an answering machine that accoustically "connected" to the handset, and had a mechanical device to hold down the switch-hook until it needed to answer the phone. The phone company answering machine could record 15 calls on a 4" (IIRC) wide tape. The outgoing 30 second message was on track #1, incoming 30 second messages were recorded on tracks 2-16. The machine played the outgoing message, rewound the tape and moved the head during the beep, and then recorded the incoming message. It was in every sense of the word, a piece of crap! You couldn't own a phone in those days either, you rented them from the Telco. IIRC, it was around 1980 that we could buy our own phones to use. And the phones they sold were nowhere near the quality of the rented phones. Yep, like nospam said, those telco phones were indestructible. I remember the "Princess" model that you would place on a desk. It weighed a ton, you could use it as a weapon. |
#85
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
In article , PAS wrote:
You couldn't own a phone in those days either, you rented them from the Telco. IIRC, it was around 1980 that we could buy our own phones to use. And the phones they sold were nowhere near the quality of the rented phones. Yep, like nospam said, those telco phones were indestructible. I remember the "Princess" model that you would place on a desk. It weighed a ton, you could use it as a weapon. princess phones didn't weigh a ton. they were small phones, typically used on a nightstand. they're also highly sought after by collectors. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped.../Western_Elect ric_Company_Princess_phones.jpg/1024px-Western_Electric_Company_Princess _phones.jpg the most rugged phone was the model 500 desk phone, especially the really old ones with the metal rotary dial. you could stand on it and it wouldn't crack. the ones with a plastic dial and touchtone were still strong but not quite as rugged. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped.../Model500Telep hone1951.jpg/800px-Model500Telephone1951.jpg |
#86
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
In article , PeterN
wrote: The do not call list is a waste. I would not be surprised if that list was hacked and used for those robo calls. it's not a total waste because if you tell a spammer to not call and they call again, they may be subject to penalties, assuming you can figure out who they are. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/medi...ll-registry/en forcement The FTC takes aggressive legal action to make sure telemarketers abide by the Do Not Call Registry. To date, the Commission has brought 105 enforcement actions against companies and telemarketers for Do Not Call, abandoned call, robocall and Registry violations. The Mortgage Investors litigation produced the largest settlement for Do Not Call violations, resulting in civil penalty payments of $7.5 million. To date, 80 of these FTC enforcement actions have been resolved, and in those cases the agency has recovered over $41 million in civil penalties and $33 million in redress or disgorgement. They claim to be aggressive. there are some good people there, but they are hindered by lack of adequate funding. The way to enforce is simple. With the consent of appropriate enforcement agencies, authorize civilian sting operations. the fact that there have only been 105 enforcement actions tells me they're not all that aggressive. |
#87
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
In article , PAS wrote:
some features do cost extra, such as virtual fax, because it captures the fax and sends it to you via email, or you can email your fax to them (as an attachment) and it will be sent to the specified number. you can always use your own fax machine for no additional cost (other than per minute fees, if any). How well does using a fax machine work with this service, I wonder. probably quite well, because the virtual fax service doesn't actually use voip. it's a fax via the ptsn, converting to/fro email attachments. there are websites that offer similar functionality. Faxing over a "Regular" VOIP line is not reliable. I've been able to send some faxes but I cannot receive any. It was the same with my two prior VOIP services, even worse in one case where I couldn't even send a fax. i've been faxing over voip for years and never had any major problems, even without t.38 support. about the only problems are the usual fax machine negotiation problems that happen on non-voip lines too. after all, it's just a modem. |
#88
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
On 6/22/2016 11:45 AM, nospam wrote:
In article , PeterN wrote: The do not call list is a waste. I would not be surprised if that list was hacked and used for those robo calls. it's not a total waste because if you tell a spammer to not call and they call again, they may be subject to penalties, assuming you can figure out who they are. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/medi...ll-registry/en forcement The FTC takes aggressive legal action to make sure telemarketers abide by the Do Not Call Registry. To date, the Commission has brought 105 enforcement actions against companies and telemarketers for Do Not Call, abandoned call, robocall and Registry violations. The Mortgage Investors litigation produced the largest settlement for Do Not Call violations, resulting in civil penalty payments of $7.5 million. To date, 80 of these FTC enforcement actions have been resolved, and in those cases the agency has recovered over $41 million in civil penalties and $33 million in redress or disgorgement. They claim to be aggressive. there are some good people there, but they are hindered by lack of adequate funding. The way to enforce is simple. With the consent of appropriate enforcement agencies, authorize civilian sting operations. the fact that there have only been 105 enforcement actions tells me they're not all that aggressive. Well you did quote the FTC site as as claiming to be aggressive -- PeterN |
#89
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
In article , PeterN
wrote: The do not call list is a waste. I would not be surprised if that list was hacked and used for those robo calls. it's not a total waste because if you tell a spammer to not call and they call again, they may be subject to penalties, assuming you can figure out who they are. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/medi...ll-registry/en forcement The FTC takes aggressive legal action to make sure telemarketers abide by the Do Not Call Registry. To date, the Commission has brought 105 enforcement actions against companies and telemarketers for Do Not Call, abandoned call, robocall and Registry violations. The Mortgage Investors litigation produced the largest settlement for Do Not Call violations, resulting in civil penalty payments of $7.5 million. To date, 80 of these FTC enforcement actions have been resolved, and in those cases the agency has recovered over $41 million in civil penalties and $33 million in redress or disgorgement. They claim to be aggressive. there are some good people there, but they are hindered by lack of adequate funding. The way to enforce is simple. With the consent of appropriate enforcement agencies, authorize civilian sting operations. the fact that there have only been 105 enforcement actions tells me they're not all that aggressive. Well you did quote the FTC site as as claiming to be aggressive it's their claim, not mine. leave the misinterpretation of the ftc statements to others |
#90
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Misleading bloggers and the use of "free".
On 6/22/2016 11:45 AM, nospam wrote:
In article , PAS wrote: You couldn't own a phone in those days either, you rented them from the Telco. IIRC, it was around 1980 that we could buy our own phones to use. And the phones they sold were nowhere near the quality of the rented phones. Yep, like nospam said, those telco phones were indestructible. I remember the "Princess" model that you would place on a desk. It weighed a ton, you could use it as a weapon. princess phones didn't weigh a ton. they were small phones, typically used on a nightstand. they're also highly sought after by collectors. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped.../Western_Elect ric_Company_Princess_phones.jpg/1024px-Western_Electric_Company_Princess _phones.jpg the most rugged phone was the model 500 desk phone, especially the really old ones with the metal rotary dial. you could stand on it and it wouldn't crack. the ones with a plastic dial and touchtone were still strong but not quite as rugged. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped.../Model500Telep hone1951.jpg/800px-Model500Telephone1951.jpg Yes, it's the model 500 I was referring to, not the princess phone. Calling it a tank would be an understatement. |
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