“blocking will expire 90 days from the date of your first block. You can reestablish blocking adding back blocking preferences after they expire.”

It almost seems like you should consider rewriting your article as this service was launched on the 31st of March, over a month before you penned your post:

Verizon just started rolling out a new service to all of their phones including BlackBerry called Call & Message Block. A wonderfully free service, it will let you block any number from sending you texts, pictures or phone calls. BlackBerry support is already there but I really am happiest that Verizon found it in their heart to give us control of our number for free. Found at vzw.com/spamcontrols, the service lets you manually filter your calls based on number and prevents them from reaching you at all. Enjoy!

I ended up contacting my local law enforcement agency. Surprisingly Verizon was quite responsive to them. Turns out the guy was a 3rd tier sexual offender, non-compliant with his probation. I wonder if he was contacting other females as well.

I was very disappointed with Verizon’s response to my situation, to say the least.

The application runs entirely on the device, with no backend network support.

Additionally, we think the application actually works better as a ‘client’ than a back end service. It allows the user fine grain detail. For example, maybe your brother is calling you non-stop today so you add him to the list but you certainly want to quickly take him off tomorrow. Much easier to do so when its on the phone versus some website or call center.

Another nice part about having it ‘on phone’ is the instant response. One of the features allows you to quickly add a number you just ignored. This would be a pain on a website as you would have to look up the number and type it in.

We built this application because we too thought ‘this should be standard on every phone’. Our goal and anticipation is that it will be picked up by the carrier and included at some point. Backup Assistant is a good example. It was built by a 3rd party and then incorporated into the Verizon brand. It is now free; hopefully we can follow the same model.

Thanks again for posting about our app and generating good discussion.
Cheers,

I learned of this after I contacted the VZW VP of Legal & External Affairs as well as the Executive Relations Team after my fourteen year old daughter was receiving inappropriate calls and TXTs.

Yes, there may be a one time capital and R&D cost but it’s minimal. They can charge a one-time $3.50 and more than cover their costs. It probably took a 12 person team of programmers and testers a few weeks to implement this. I bet it adds up to a million bucks tops.

Think of SMS. How much heavy lifting do you think their network has to do to push the max 160 chars/message? SMS infrastructure is already built and the capital outlay has been paid over a million times. There is still an ongoing cost for maintenance and support of the SMS infrastructure but I severely doubt it comes even close to $5/month/customer. Why do you think the feds are investigating the carriers for price fixing SMS? It’s a cash cow.

It’s not about “evil”. Every company has the right to earn as much revenue as possible. In fact, it’s their duty to do so for their share holders. I don’t blame Verizon for trying to squeeze as much revenue out of their existing user base as possible.

It is, however, about a de facto oligopoly. If we had true competition in the wireless space we would all have an unlimited voice/data plan with GPS and all the “extra” goodies for $40/month. I’m pretty sure that’s the way it’s eventually headed anyway. Technology always finds a way.

I have had “Anonymous Call Reject” on my Verizon home phone seemingly forever. Every time I ask for it on my cell I am told there us a technical limitation due to the distributed nature of cell service. Unlike wired, they never know where your wireless will be at the time a call is routed to you. Sounds like they found a technical solution but maybe its not cheap to implement so they need to charge to even offer it at all?
That said, $3.49 per month feels awful steep. I suspect just like when features like call waiting and caller I’d and such were rolling to wired and each came with yet another charge, soon bundling of this sort of service in order to remain competitive on cost will eventually bring it down to much lower or free price point. But I would never opt for this at this price.