How Do I Filter Phone Calls on a Land Line?

An anonymous reader asks: "I have a telephone on a plain old land-line, with the option of subscribing to caller-id. I would like to filter incoming phone calls, diverting them to either the handset or answering machine, based on whether the caller-id matches a list of trusted phone numbers. Considering that many of today's land-line telephone handsets can display caller-id and store a list of favourite phone numbers, I don't think this is technologically difficult. AI am not interested in: subscribing to a service provided by my telephone company. I would prefer the filtering occurred on my side of the phone line, or implementing a software solution on my PC. Frankly, that is overkill, and I don't want my PC turned on permanently. I would prefer something like a small, solid-state hardware device. Is there any such thing available?"

Comments

There is

[Anonymous Coward]

I beleive it's called a "wife". However, it's very very hard to pick these things up at a hardware store, and you can't get them off the internet (or at least the internet versions don't handle english language filtering all that well). I'd suggest that looking for more information on wives from slashdot is probably a waste of time.

Re:There is

[Kadin2048]

I beleive it's called a "wife".

I've seen some reports that would indicate that the TCO of many "wife" implementations is rather high. Vendors are often willing to subsidize the rollout, but pretty much leave you on your own after that in terms of maintainence. Not to mention that once you contract, it can be notoriously difficult to bring in outside consultants down the road.