Rogers and Bell have announced that they have started implementing universal call blocking as per the CRTC’s mandate from last year.
On December 19th 2018, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ruled that Canadian carriers need to implement universal network-level blocking of calls with blatantly illegitimate caller identification in order to address spam calls.
It is a solution that is applied to all incoming calls for wireless, IP and landline phones.
Although Rogers and Bell have announced the implementation of the ruling, Canadian carriers have until December 19th 2019 to carry out the mandate. Telus, the remainder of the Big Three, has confirmed to MobileSyrup that it will implement the directive in the coming weeks.
Universal call blocking will prevent users from receiving calls that are coming from malformed numbers. This usually refers to numbers that don’t comply with the North American Numbering Plan or numbers that have more than 15 digits.
It is important to note that universal call blocking only works with malformed numbers, and will likely not stop spam calls that come from numbers that appear legitimate.
Update 04/11/19: The article was updated with additional reporting regarding Telus.
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