8 ms·

My name is James, I work for Community Phone, a nationwide cell phone company. Show of hands: if we opened up this feature for you to control this filter for y

My name is James, I work for Community Phone, a nationwide cell phone company. Show of hands: if we opened up this feature for you to control this filter for yourself or your loved ones, holding all else constant (price and coverage), would that be sufficient to cause a switch to try out an alternate provider?

meetuu 8y ago
hi James, This filter is a filter i would love to have for my phone, there is a wish list that could accompany the desire to filter calls, a ^large^ list perhaps, but i think it would be summed up as another user has stated, I want my phone to serve me, not the other way around. I also believe the smart phone thing has been abused for far too long, to the point I will not operate a smart phone for reasons of security, privacy and the interruption of tasks with alerts popups updates, and feature bloating. baked in apps that depart radicly from the stated function of the app, unnessecary permisions and connectivity. These reasons and more are why i refuse to use anything other than a dinosaur flipphone, and e-mail. thanks for the ear James.
- wittedhaddock 8y ago
  Hi meetuu, thanks very much for your thoughtful response. I totally can relate to your desire for that feature and I hope you do not feel ashamed for it. Your phone is a personal device, and it ought to exist to serve your personal preferences so that you may live the best possible life with the thing (toleration or enjoyment)! I think it can be confusing now, that they have become so impersonally social, that we can be made to feel strange for wanting them to behave in different ways. And I appreciate your desire for simplicity and wanting to get to the essence of your communications. At what point did you finally decide to leave your smartphone behind and how severe of a lifestyle change have you had to make in order to operate and function as you have come to expect of yourself? - We currently offer unlimited talking and texting for $15/month + state taxes and FCC fees, or ~$18.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    Interesting, got any family plans?
    - wittedhaddock 8y ago
      Absolutely. Our most popular family plans involve two unlimited everything plans for the kids ($45 each for two, or $50 for one) and then a $35 2gb plan for the parents with an additional line of unlimited t&t for $10 sharing that 2gb pool, or $45 + $90 = $135 plus taxes and fcc fees for the 4 lines.
  - samstave 8y ago
    Hi James, Interesting service - how did it get started? I see that you're all over the site, assuming youre "Strategy Team James"... Are you the founder of this service? Who backs the network you talk to? Would you have a data-only-text-only SIM plan? (i.e. could I have a ~$3/month SIM that ONLY allowed Text? or a $5/month plan that ONLY allowed text+SOME data? I'd like to put sims in some IoT devices - and want to find the cheapest method to allow this. I have some other ideas I'd like to talk to you guys about if these sorts of things are something you're open to. Thanks
    - wittedhaddock 8y ago
      Hi Sam, I started a previous company (caffei.net) and during this time of selling network software that improves end user privacy, battery life, network performance, and total data used to the folks building all the apps all the people use for 2 years, I grew disgusted with how little regard they have for all of the many prepaid people in the world... for whom a sloppily set up RPC connection for some trash 30 second video ad will cost them $0.40. This is why we had that lemonde.fr teardown on HN several months back: apps stuff themselves with third parties that hog up the network and thus battery life and aren't penalized for it. So the phone company we started became a way to exact the proper practices we know we can deliver, and we know that folks would benefit from. But then we started finding a lot of people in far worse situations with their big phone company providers, paying more than $300 a month for less than 2 gigabytes of data (using less than 50mb a month) etc etc. So our morals pushed us because we couldn't find anyone else helping them! Yes, Consumer Cellular, and yes GreatCall, are supposed to be good, but in practice for about 5% of users, they are really, really bad. And yeah I'm a founder. We use AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile networks. We also peer with a few hundred regional carriers around the world. What is your business application and how big of a cost component are these SIM cards and how many of them would you need? Have you checked out hologram.io? They have a card built for this IIRC. Always open to ideas! I am james@communityphone.org
danShumway 8y ago
Huh. I am currently on Google Fi. I'm not thrilled putting Google in charge of my mobile data, but I still trust Google to safeguard my privacy more than any of the major telcos, and for someone who uses small amounts of data, they're very competitively priced and have really good, simple billing. But particularly with the Librem Phone coming up, I've been trying to find other phone providers I won't hate that can give me more flexibility in devices and that at least somewhat shares my values. Community Phone looks really interesting. I'm frankly a little bit weirded out that the prices are that low, I'm going over the site trying to figure out what the tradeoffs are. Rolling out a feature like this would definitely make me more interested in switching. Even if I didn't think it was valuable for me personally, it would make me feel like the company was in close contact with its users and working with them, rather than just blindly selling to them. From a pure feature point of view, I would still want unknown people to be able to leave me messages. I get legitimate calls from unknown numbers -- but my policy is that if I don't know you and the call isn't important enough to leave a message, you're either spam or I don't care. If it is important enough to leave a message, I screen that and then add the number to my contact list if it's legit.
- wittedhaddock 8y ago
  Hey danShumway, thanks for your note here. I am going to share it with my colleagues if that's okay with you. You express a very important culture and way of working. The real answer is that our prices are low because most of our users to date use less than 1gb per line (nearly all senior citizens on our 15 or 25 plans)... they were overpaying the most while using the least (but even for them we cannot be too low otherwise even the stingiest would think our pricing is too low to be credible... and I am laughed out of /r/nocontract for having prices that are way too high). And since building that volume, we've been able to keep our prices as they are, due to better negotiations with carriers. That said, most of our customers to date join us just because they like getting a human from Boston or Milwaukee when they answer the phone who can help them quickly, listens intently to what you say, and doesn't require a "tech-ese" For how long were you with your previous carrier before joining Google Fi and when did you make the switch?
  - 8y ago
masukomi 8y ago
> would that be sufficient to cause a switch to try out an alternate provider? yes, OMG YES. i get _at least_ 5 spam calls a day. It drives me mad. PLEASE let me whitelist. I'd still need comparable coverage and pricing, and be able to use my iphone but yes i would switch carriers.
joshstrange 8y ago
James, your service looks interesting but your data plans seem very low (in size, not price). 1, 2, 4GB plans with $5/0.5GB overage costs?
- wittedhaddock 8y ago
  Right. Most people people just sign up for our $25 plan for unlimited talk and text with 1 fast gigabyte of data, and overage 100mbs for $1 + sales taxes
  - C4K3 8y ago
    Your website doesn't list the overage price for the $25 plan, only the two other plans.
    - wittedhaddock 8y ago
      Thanks. Yeah our website doesn't do us justice :)
inetknght 8y ago
I have several devices including iPhone XS, a few Android devices, and a hotspot; each with its own number. How many devices do you support per account? Do you have an unlimited account and what sort of bandwidth limits do you have? I live in Houston, TX. My current carrier is T-mobile. I'm fairly satisfied with cell service where I live, but my parents' home an hour away is garbage. How's your coverage there? In addition to leaving my devices in do-not-disturb mode, I also specifically disable my voicemail. I am not interested in voicemail messages and have repeatedly asked to have T-mobile permanently disable it for my phones but it keeps turning up anyway. Is Community Phone able to resolve that? What I would rather have would be if voicemail and other messages could be delivered directly to a personal email address and/or posted to a personal file server. I want to be able to aggregate my phone numbers' correspondence in any standard desktop mail client like Thunderbird.
smt88 8y ago
No. Android + Google resolved my problems with spam calls.
- tones411 8y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - smt88 8y ago
    Spam call filtering is built in to Android now. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/3459196?hl=en https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/3459196?hl=en
- wittedhaddock 8y ago
  Awesome! How long did it take to solve, and for how many years did you have the problem before solving it?
  - smt88 8y ago
    Android just started doing a good job of blocking them one day. I didn't do anything. I had tried Hiya and Jolly Roger Telephone Co, but neither was good enough to be worth the bugs and loss of privacy. I had the problem intermittently for years, but it becamw awful (like 6+ spam calls a day) for two weeks before Google apparently fixed it.
    - thrill 8y ago
      I use the DND of Android Pixel 2. I got 26 calls yesterday that never rang, the majority of which show as local numbers. About half of those left 4 second voicemails. Out of curiosity I turned it off for about 10 minutes. Got the evergreen "you've won a cruise" call.
uberduber 8y ago
Yes, for certain older relatives who are vulnerable to phone scams. I think you should market it that way. I feel like if I just told some of my relatives about it without it being marketed, they would think I'm the one scamming them.
- wittedhaddock 8y ago
  Have your older relatives shown a proclivity for phone scams?
  - thrill 8y ago
    Oh hell yeah. My elderly mother started buying anything pitched to her before I jumped in and spent six months undoing that damage.
  - uberduber 8y ago
    Yes, though some of them already had a proclivity when they were young, it's gotten worse. Sometimes getting them a prepaid phone with limited minutes, like 100/month or 1000/year, manages to fix it because it stops them from answering calls from unrecognized numbers. I guess the logic is they get upset about spending 4 cents a minute.
njarboe 8y ago
Telephone spam was not much of a problem before unlimited cell phone calling plans. I would love a system to charge people who aren't on my white list an amount of money I determine to call me. I'd probably put it at 10 cents so as to not hurt legitimate callers but basically kill spammers. Warren Buffet might set his to $10 million.
- wittedhaddock 8y ago
  If this system existed, would you be pilling to port your phone number over to us today to try it out, potentially even paying slightly more upfront?
  - njarboe 8y ago
    If the coverage and wifi integration was as good as Google Fi and my girlfriend and I can use our Nexus 5 phones, I would definitely do it right now. I would also pay a decent premium over our $35 a month unlimited call/text, $10 Gig data plan. The easy international hookup feature of Google fi I could give up, although that is pretty sweet. All over Europe my phone would hook up automagically with the local system about 30min after my plane landed.
adenner 8y ago
I also am on Fi, the feature would at least get my attention. The biggest problem I would have currently with going to your service is the fact that it is on the Sprint network, currently the last place provider in my area.
- wittedhaddock 8y ago
  How is T-Mobile or AT&T coverage in your area? We offer them as well.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
broahmed 8y ago
Hey James. Honestly, it probably wouldn't be enough for me to switch. I've been using the do-not-disturb solution for a few weeks now and I'm mostly satisfied. However, that proposed feature plus the fact you don't sell user data to advertisers (reading your website) is appealing...
gwbas1c 8y ago
Honestly, I would pay for a feature where: - People in my contact list (or whitelist) automatically get through - Everyone else is forwarded to a real live human who screens my calls (The reason why I would pay is I'd rather just have a well-paid human handle this instead of some kind of AI or heuristic.) The human could be paired with some data, like what phone network the call came from, and additional data about how likely caller ID is spoofed. If you want to get fancy, you could do some kind of machine learning where you tell the person, "this call is xx% likely to be spam." To keep things simple, I shouldn't be able to set many preferences. (This allows the human to react the same way every time.) But, things like choosing to allow or block "good" robocalls, like automated calls from the power company, are probably useful. You could try to make a profit by actually asking to get on the do-not-call list, tracking it, and then aggressively suing violators. When I'm interrupted on my cell phone, I just don't have the time to track this kind of thing. And, one more thing: If you want to get into AI, see if you can figure out how to keep the spammers on the phone as long as possible. This increases their costs dramatically.
- wittedhaddock 8y ago
  Hi, a friend of mine started a similar thing called the Jolly Roger Telephone company. You should check them out, to fully appreciate the merit of your final point :) Regarding your proposed feature, how much time, or how many calls/fewer distractions, would you look forward to saving every month if this real live human did their job well?
- mikhailfranco 8y ago
  Ask Lenny to help: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/28/using-chatbots-against-voicespam-analyzing-lennys-effectiveness/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/28/using-chatbots-against-v...
craftyguy 8y ago
Sounds like it would require customers to provide you with all their contacts for creating the filter? If so, no thanks. This feature could be implemented 100% on the device itself, without leaking information.
chaoticmass 8y ago
Yes.

meetuu 8y ago

hi James, This filter is a filter i would love to have for my phone, there is a wish list that could accompany the desire to filter calls, a ^large^ list perhaps, but i think it would be summed up as another user has stated, I want my phone to serve me, not the other way around. I also believe the smart phone thing has been abused for far too long, to the point I will not operate a smart phone for reasons of security, privacy and the interruption of tasks with alerts popups updates, and feature bloating. baked in apps that depart radicly from the stated function of the app, unnessecary permisions and connectivity. These reasons and more are why i refuse to use anything other than a dinosaur flipphone, and e-mail. thanks for the ear James.

wittedhaddock 8y ago
Hi meetuu, thanks very much for your thoughtful response. I totally can relate to your desire for that feature and I hope you do not feel ashamed for it. Your phone is a personal device, and it ought to exist to serve your personal preferences so that you may live the best possible life with the thing (toleration or enjoyment)! I think it can be confusing now, that they have become so impersonally social, that we can be made to feel strange for wanting them to behave in different ways. And I appreciate your desire for simplicity and wanting to get to the essence of your communications. At what point did you finally decide to leave your smartphone behind and how severe of a lifestyle change have you had to make in order to operate and function as you have come to expect of yourself? - We currently offer unlimited talking and texting for $15/month + state taxes and FCC fees, or ~$18.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  Interesting, got any family plans?
  - wittedhaddock 8y ago
    Absolutely. Our most popular family plans involve two unlimited everything plans for the kids ($45 each for two, or $50 for one) and then a $35 2gb plan for the parents with an additional line of unlimited t&t for $10 sharing that 2gb pool, or $45 + $90 = $135 plus taxes and fcc fees for the 4 lines.
- samstave 8y ago
  Hi James, Interesting service - how did it get started? I see that you're all over the site, assuming youre "Strategy Team James"... Are you the founder of this service? Who backs the network you talk to? Would you have a data-only-text-only SIM plan? (i.e. could I have a ~$3/month SIM that ONLY allowed Text? or a $5/month plan that ONLY allowed text+SOME data? I'd like to put sims in some IoT devices - and want to find the cheapest method to allow this. I have some other ideas I'd like to talk to you guys about if these sorts of things are something you're open to. Thanks
  - wittedhaddock 8y ago
    Hi Sam, I started a previous company (caffei.net) and during this time of selling network software that improves end user privacy, battery life, network performance, and total data used to the folks building all the apps all the people use for 2 years, I grew disgusted with how little regard they have for all of the many prepaid people in the world... for whom a sloppily set up RPC connection for some trash 30 second video ad will cost them $0.40. This is why we had that lemonde.fr teardown on HN several months back: apps stuff themselves with third parties that hog up the network and thus battery life and aren't penalized for it. So the phone company we started became a way to exact the proper practices we know we can deliver, and we know that folks would benefit from. But then we started finding a lot of people in far worse situations with their big phone company providers, paying more than $300 a month for less than 2 gigabytes of data (using less than 50mb a month) etc etc. So our morals pushed us because we couldn't find anyone else helping them! Yes, Consumer Cellular, and yes GreatCall, are supposed to be good, but in practice for about 5% of users, they are really, really bad. And yeah I'm a founder. We use AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile networks. We also peer with a few hundred regional carriers around the world. What is your business application and how big of a cost component are these SIM cards and how many of them would you need? Have you checked out hologram.io? They have a card built for this IIRC. Always open to ideas! I am james@communityphone.org

danShumway 8y ago

Huh. I am currently on Google Fi. I'm not thrilled putting Google in charge of my mobile data, but I still trust Google to safeguard my privacy more than any of the major telcos, and for someone who uses small amounts of data, they're very competitively priced and have really good, simple billing. But particularly with the Librem Phone coming up, I've been trying to find other phone providers I won't hate that can give me more flexibility in devices and that at least somewhat shares my values. Community Phone looks really interesting. I'm frankly a little bit weirded out that the prices are that low, I'm going over the site trying to figure out what the tradeoffs are. Rolling out a feature like this would definitely make me more interested in switching. Even if I didn't think it was valuable for me personally, it would make me feel like the company was in close contact with its users and working with them, rather than just blindly selling to them. From a pure feature point of view, I would still want unknown people to be able to leave me messages. I get legitimate calls from unknown numbers -- but my policy is that if I don't know you and the call isn't important enough to leave a message, you're either spam or I don't care. If it is important enough to leave a message, I screen that and then add the number to my contact list if it's legit.

wittedhaddock 8y ago
Hey danShumway, thanks for your note here. I am going to share it with my colleagues if that's okay with you. You express a very important culture and way of working. The real answer is that our prices are low because most of our users to date use less than 1gb per line (nearly all senior citizens on our 15 or 25 plans)... they were overpaying the most while using the least (but even for them we cannot be too low otherwise even the stingiest would think our pricing is too low to be credible... and I am laughed out of /r/nocontract for having prices that are way too high). And since building that volume, we've been able to keep our prices as they are, due to better negotiations with carriers. That said, most of our customers to date join us just because they like getting a human from Boston or Milwaukee when they answer the phone who can help them quickly, listens intently to what you say, and doesn't require a "tech-ese" For how long were you with your previous carrier before joining Google Fi and when did you make the switch?
- 8y ago

masukomi 8y ago

> would that be sufficient to cause a switch to try out an alternate provider? yes, OMG YES. i get _at least_ 5 spam calls a day. It drives me mad. PLEASE let me whitelist. I'd still need comparable coverage and pricing, and be able to use my iphone but yes i would switch carriers.

joshstrange 8y ago

James, your service looks interesting but your data plans seem very low (in size, not price). 1, 2, 4GB plans with $5/0.5GB overage costs?

wittedhaddock 8y ago
Right. Most people people just sign up for our $25 plan for unlimited talk and text with 1 fast gigabyte of data, and overage 100mbs for $1 + sales taxes
- C4K3 8y ago
  Your website doesn't list the overage price for the $25 plan, only the two other plans.
  - wittedhaddock 8y ago
    Thanks. Yeah our website doesn't do us justice :)

inetknght 8y ago

I have several devices including iPhone XS, a few Android devices, and a hotspot; each with its own number. How many devices do you support per account? Do you have an unlimited account and what sort of bandwidth limits do you have? I live in Houston, TX. My current carrier is T-mobile. I'm fairly satisfied with cell service where I live, but my parents' home an hour away is garbage. How's your coverage there? In addition to leaving my devices in do-not-disturb mode, I also specifically disable my voicemail. I am not interested in voicemail messages and have repeatedly asked to have T-mobile permanently disable it for my phones but it keeps turning up anyway. Is Community Phone able to resolve that? What I would rather have would be if voicemail and other messages could be delivered directly to a personal email address and/or posted to a personal file server. I want to be able to aggregate my phone numbers' correspondence in any standard desktop mail client like Thunderbird.

smt88 8y ago

No. Android + Google resolved my problems with spam calls.

tones411 8y ago
Can you elaborate?
- smt88 8y ago
  Spam call filtering is built in to Android now. https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/3459196?hl=en https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/3459196?hl=en
wittedhaddock 8y ago
Awesome! How long did it take to solve, and for how many years did you have the problem before solving it?
- smt88 8y ago
  Android just started doing a good job of blocking them one day. I didn't do anything. I had tried Hiya and Jolly Roger Telephone Co, but neither was good enough to be worth the bugs and loss of privacy. I had the problem intermittently for years, but it becamw awful (like 6+ spam calls a day) for two weeks before Google apparently fixed it.
  - thrill 8y ago
    I use the DND of Android Pixel 2. I got 26 calls yesterday that never rang, the majority of which show as local numbers. About half of those left 4 second voicemails. Out of curiosity I turned it off for about 10 minutes. Got the evergreen "you've won a cruise" call.

uberduber 8y ago

Yes, for certain older relatives who are vulnerable to phone scams. I think you should market it that way. I feel like if I just told some of my relatives about it without it being marketed, they would think I'm the one scamming them.

wittedhaddock 8y ago
Have your older relatives shown a proclivity for phone scams?
- thrill 8y ago
  Oh hell yeah. My elderly mother started buying anything pitched to her before I jumped in and spent six months undoing that damage.
- uberduber 8y ago
  Yes, though some of them already had a proclivity when they were young, it's gotten worse. Sometimes getting them a prepaid phone with limited minutes, like 100/month or 1000/year, manages to fix it because it stops them from answering calls from unrecognized numbers. I guess the logic is they get upset about spending 4 cents a minute.

njarboe 8y ago

Telephone spam was not much of a problem before unlimited cell phone calling plans. I would love a system to charge people who aren't on my white list an amount of money I determine to call me. I'd probably put it at 10 cents so as to not hurt legitimate callers but basically kill spammers. Warren Buffet might set his to $10 million.

wittedhaddock 8y ago
If this system existed, would you be pilling to port your phone number over to us today to try it out, potentially even paying slightly more upfront?
- njarboe 8y ago
  If the coverage and wifi integration was as good as Google Fi and my girlfriend and I can use our Nexus 5 phones, I would definitely do it right now. I would also pay a decent premium over our $35 a month unlimited call/text, $10 Gig data plan. The easy international hookup feature of Google fi I could give up, although that is pretty sweet. All over Europe my phone would hook up automagically with the local system about 30min after my plane landed.

adenner 8y ago

I also am on Fi, the feature would at least get my attention. The biggest problem I would have currently with going to your service is the fact that it is on the Sprint network, currently the last place provider in my area.

wittedhaddock 8y ago
How is T-Mobile or AT&T coverage in your area? We offer them as well.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

broahmed 8y ago

Hey James. Honestly, it probably wouldn't be enough for me to switch. I've been using the do-not-disturb solution for a few weeks now and I'm mostly satisfied. However, that proposed feature plus the fact you don't sell user data to advertisers (reading your website) is appealing...

gwbas1c 8y ago

Honestly, I would pay for a feature where: - People in my contact list (or whitelist) automatically get through - Everyone else is forwarded to a real live human who screens my calls (The reason why I would pay is I'd rather just have a well-paid human handle this instead of some kind of AI or heuristic.) The human could be paired with some data, like what phone network the call came from, and additional data about how likely caller ID is spoofed. If you want to get fancy, you could do some kind of machine learning where you tell the person, "this call is xx% likely to be spam." To keep things simple, I shouldn't be able to set many preferences. (This allows the human to react the same way every time.) But, things like choosing to allow or block "good" robocalls, like automated calls from the power company, are probably useful. You could try to make a profit by actually asking to get on the do-not-call list, tracking it, and then aggressively suing violators. When I'm interrupted on my cell phone, I just don't have the time to track this kind of thing. And, one more thing: If you want to get into AI, see if you can figure out how to keep the spammers on the phone as long as possible. This increases their costs dramatically.

wittedhaddock 8y ago
Hi, a friend of mine started a similar thing called the Jolly Roger Telephone company. You should check them out, to fully appreciate the merit of your final point :) Regarding your proposed feature, how much time, or how many calls/fewer distractions, would you look forward to saving every month if this real live human did their job well?
mikhailfranco 8y ago
Ask Lenny to help: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/28/using-chatbots-against-voicespam-analyzing-lennys-effectiveness/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/28/using-chatbots-against-v...

craftyguy 8y ago

Sounds like it would require customers to provide you with all their contacts for creating the filter? If so, no thanks. This feature could be implemented 100% on the device itself, without leaking information.

chaoticmass 8y ago

Yes.