In recent months many VoIP providers have seen a large increase in attempted fraudulent activity on their platforms. So, as part of our commitment to keeping our customers safe, we are introducing a new feature to our VoIP service: Call barring.
Call barring will allow you to select which destinations (e.g. specific countries, premium rate numbers) lines on your account are permitted to call. Our call barring feature allows you to block calls to chosen destinations on a per extension basis. This means that any calls to destinations you have not permitted will be blocked, protecting you from any fraudulent activity. This new feature is now available to all our VoIP customers.
By default, all customers (and extensions) are able to call UK numbers and certain low cost international destinations. Any attempt to make a call to any other country will fail, and you will hear a forbidden tone.
If you wish, you can manually allow calls to other destinations of your choice.
Modifying call barring settings
If you wish to create a custom call barring rule, click on Call Barring in the control panel menu. You can base your new rule on an existing rule set if you wish, and the allowed destinations from this rule will be copied to your new rule. This is useful if you only want to make a few changes. By default, we have two rules pre-configured – UK and low cost international and UK only.
Alternatively, you can use [blank], which will give you a blank canvas to start from. Do bear in mind that using this will mean ALL calls would be barred until you allow destinations.
Enter a name for your reference and click Create. Your new rule will appear and you can click edit to configure it.
Configuring a rule is simple. You will see a list of destinations, and to enable (or disable) calls to that destination simply click the box alongside it. If you need to add more specific rules, for example restrict calls to a certain area code within a country, simply click the add… link and enter the area code. Click Save to apply your changes to the rule set.
Applying call barring rules to extensions and trunks
There are two ways of applying call barring rules to extensions and trunks. To apply it to several at once, it’s easiest to do it from the rule editor page. On the right hand side you’ll see a list of all extensions and trunks, and you need to simply select the ones you wish to apply to the rule to and click Save.
To modify an individual extension, simply navigate to it on the Extensions page and scroll to PSTN/Billing Settings. Select the required call barring rule from the dropdown box and click Save.
Setting a default rule
If you wish for a customised rule to be used as default for all new extensions and trunks that you create, navigate to Call barring and select Default alongside the rule.
Please note that this only affects any new extensions or trunks, and not all. If you wish to apply the rule to existing trunks too click edit and apply there. You can use the Select all button to make this process easier if you have a lot of extensions and trunks.
If you delete any call barring rules that are being used by extensions or trunks, they will revert to using this default rule. If you delete the default rule itself the global default (UK and low cost international) will be used instead.
Blocking all external calls
If an extension is only required for internal calls you can easily block all outbound calls by turning off PSTN Access on the extension. To do this, navigate to the Extensions page and select the extension you wish to configure. Scroll to PSTN/Billing Settings and look for PSTN Access.
