Nuisance Calls
I sympathise.
Maybe these comments on possible solutions would be helpful (we suffered from 15 months' worth of sales calls about three years ago, looked at many options, and tried some of them):
Choose to Refuse (free for 3 months from PN - a bargain!) is effective, and can even block individual callers who withhold their number (if I understand correctly, your exchange knows their number even if it does not pass it on to you). The disadvantage, I think, is that because it doesn't tell you how many calls it is blocking, you have to turn it off at intervals to find out if you still need it - and some companies make batches of calls with long quiet periods in-between.
Anonymous Call Rejection, at £48 a year, is pricey, and has the same disadvantage.
I have not tried Truecall (about £80, depending on where you buy it from), but the online manuals make it sound a bit cumbersome to use without its Internet Control Panel - and that costs £15 a year after the first year.
For the moment, we are using a Panasonic DECT phone (~£50), which can zap calls from a list of 20 numbers (it answers them with an engaged tone, and does not ring). This is great, but it is less clever at handling 'Withheld' numbers. It does have a 'Night Mode', for which read a white-list on a timer. This means the phone only rings for known callers, and all the rest fall through to the answering machine. (Better would be if it played a specific message for withheld numbers, asking callers to ring again while releasing their number.)
Those are the best solutions I know of. The essential problem is it costs next to nothing for a company to cold call us, but us quite a lot in annoyance and hassle. I suppose it would be technically possible for the networks to charge callers a disturbance fee and credit it to our account (refundable if the call is welcome).... Well, one can always dream!
Maybe these comments on possible solutions would be helpful (we suffered from 15 months' worth of sales calls about three years ago, looked at many options, and tried some of them):
Choose to Refuse (free for 3 months from PN - a bargain!) is effective, and can even block individual callers who withhold their number (if I understand correctly, your exchange knows their number even if it does not pass it on to you). The disadvantage, I think, is that because it doesn't tell you how many calls it is blocking, you have to turn it off at intervals to find out if you still need it - and some companies make batches of calls with long quiet periods in-between.
Anonymous Call Rejection, at £48 a year, is pricey, and has the same disadvantage.
I have not tried Truecall (about £80, depending on where you buy it from), but the online manuals make it sound a bit cumbersome to use without its Internet Control Panel - and that costs £15 a year after the first year.
For the moment, we are using a Panasonic DECT phone (~£50), which can zap calls from a list of 20 numbers (it answers them with an engaged tone, and does not ring). This is great, but it is less clever at handling 'Withheld' numbers. It does have a 'Night Mode', for which read a white-list on a timer. This means the phone only rings for known callers, and all the rest fall through to the answering machine. (Better would be if it played a specific message for withheld numbers, asking callers to ring again while releasing their number.)
Those are the best solutions I know of. The essential problem is it costs next to nothing for a company to cold call us, but us quite a lot in annoyance and hassle. I suppose it would be technically possible for the networks to charge callers a disturbance fee and credit it to our account (refundable if the call is welcome).... Well, one can always dream!