I checked my bill to find instances of calls to '123' belonging to the Speaking Clock. I checked back further pages on my recent calls list to find a total of five instances each costing 50p during the last 3 months.
123 21/10/2015 09:47:09 00:01:00 £0.50
123 05/10/2015 14:02:19 00:01:00 £0.50
123 05/10/2015 13:30:20 00:01:00 £0.50
123 05/10/2015 12:39:44 00:01:00 £0.50
123 29/09/2015 13:34:19 00:01:00 £0.50
Having not made these calls or have any devices likely to have made these calls on my behalf, from what I've read on the forum Sky boxes and alarm systems seem high on the list of culprits, then Telecoms Engineers looking for available lines in the cabinets seem most likely, especially as three calls were made within a few hours.
I engaged with the online chat service as the call centre was busy and wanting an answer other than 'the calls must have been made from my end', agreed to pay the £50 Engineer call out fee payable if the fault lies within my property. The engineer came and gave my line a clean bill of health even though at times my broadband slows to a crawl and I have to reset the Openreach Modem to restore service. When this happens I try to get a Speedtest,net log which plots a graph of my results, but this usually fails due to the system timing-out during the request. What results I do have though, show instances of substantial drops in speed though infrequent. I showed the engineer my results but as I wasn't experiencing the issue at the time of his visit, he could do nothing more other than suggest the next step would be a broadband engineer visit to investigate the line more thoroughly. I digressed on to the speed/drop-out issue as other Forums have indicated that maybe it was possible that line interference could such occurrences?
A couple of years ago I had a similar bout of '123' calls and cannot recall whether I was with BT at the time or Plusnet, either way I'm not alone in being frustrated when this issue crops up. As a simple solution would it possible to block calls to this number by default and 'opt-in' if you wanted it?
