CRTC's options to filter unwanted phone calls lacking: critic

The CRTCpublished a list on Friday of features Canadian telecom customers can use to help protect themselves from unsolicited or telemarketing calls.

However,the options listed by theCanadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission includestandard home telephone features that Canadians already use.

The list, which contains 215 entries, includes options from well-known companiesincluding Bell and Rogers as well as smaller companies includingSaskTeland Wind Mobile, provided at theCRTC'srequest.

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Every company's items are listed separately, so common features offered by multiple companies appear multiple times. Voice mail, for example, appears on the list 10 times.

"We recognize that Canadians are affected by unsolicited and spoofed phone calls on a daily basis," CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais said in a statement. "We encourage the industry to pay special attention to the comments being submitted by their customers who want help to reduce illegitimate caller ID spoofing."

The list only includes options available in the commercial market, notgovernment initiatives such as the NationalDo Not Call List, which to date has registered more than 12.9 millionphone numbers.

Few useful features on the list

However, David Christopher, communications manager at OpenMedia.org, wasn't impressed by the majority of the items on the list.

"Right now I just don't see how anyone would find this useful, to be perfectly frank," he told CBC News.

"What seems to have happened is the telecom companies have just responded with listingstandard features like call display and voice mail!That's not great."

One category, intelligent call filtering, sounded more promising than the others, according to Christopher. It allows users to opt into an automatic filtering system that blocks numbers that spam people with multiple calls.

Numbers are either added automatically to the block list after registering a high volume of repeated calls, or customers can call their provider and report a number as an offender.

Of the 215 options listed on the CRTC's list, only five, including Primus Communications' Telemarketing Guard, are categorized as intelligent call filtering.

The CRTC is soliciting public feedback on the list, which can be submitted with one of the following options:

• Submitting a comment via an online form.
• Writing to the Secretary General, CRTC, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0N2.
• Sending a fax to 819-994-0218.