Shropshire BT centre fighting nuisance phone calls

BT's site at Oswestry, which employs 440 people across two buildings, is launching a new service today which will divert nuisance calls to landlines into a junk voicemail box, similar to those operated on e-mail systems.

The service will harness huge computing power to analyse large amounts of live data, which will allow network experts at the Oswestry centre to identify rogue numbers.

Typically, these will be numbers which make very large numbers of calls, and these will be added to a BT blacklist, cutting the number of similar calls received by customers.

John Petter, chief executive of BT's Consumer business, said: "Nuisance calls are one of the great annoyances of modern life.

"Everyone will have received one. We are delighted to have made this major breakthrough. We are giving control of the landline back to our customers and removing a major hassle and grief for millions of customers."

He added: "We have been at the forefront of equipping our customers to defend themselves against the flow of PPI and unwanted marketing calls that has become a flood in recent years.

"Now we are able to announce that we are working to identify and tackle huge numbers of those calls in the network.

"We are doing our bit. We call on other providers to up their game in the fight against this menace. They can help us to root out the malicious players they may be hosting on their own networks when we identify dodgy and suspicious calling behaviour."

The move comes on the back of research by Which? showing that 75 per cent of BT customers receive at least one unwanted spam-type call per month.

BT estimates that the new service will enable it to divert 25 million unwanted calls into the junk mailbox each week.

The blacklist will be expanded if large numbers of customers identify troublesome numbers that they wish to divert.

Customers will also be able to compile their own personal blacklist by adding individual unwanted numbers, as well as nominating whole categories of calls they want to avoid, such as international calls or withheld numbers.

BT will then prevent these types of calls from reaching peoples' homes.

The development will also allow BT to share information with regulators, such as Ofcom and the Information Commissioner's Office, to help those agencies build on the public awareness and enforcement action already being taken.

As well as hundreds of people in Oswestry, BT also employs around 380 people across two sites in Shrewsbury.