Apparently the world is suffering from an absolute epidemic of nuisance calls. The Telegraph newspaper recently reported that British homes are receiving around 3.2 billion (yes billion) nuisance calls each year, mostly from those screamingly annoying robo-callers from big companies. British Gas alone makes a good 4 million calls a year, which is a staggering number when you think about it. And the US is no better off.

So it’s all the more depressing when we see that the best response industry can make to combat this pernicious traffic is to develop products we have to buy in order to deal with the problem. No talk about actually legislating to stop it.

Anyway the latest in the devices on offer is this BT 6700 Cordless DECT Phone with Nuisance Call Blocker. This spectacularly ugly piece of work comes with an integrated answering machine, handsfree speaker, and a feature to let you block calls from international numbers, withheld numbers and specific numbers which you know are used by telemarketers.

Unfortunately the phone only lets you add up to 10 of these numbers, so if you’re plagued by more of these scum, you’re out of luck unless you can catch them with the blanket international and withheld lists. We’re not sure why they’ve got this limitation (the system can actually store up to 200 contacts in its memory, so surely there’s space for more than 10 numbers?) but it does reduce the utility of the product quite significantly in our opinion.

Anyhoo, you can buy the phone in single, dual or quad packs if you need a whole house full of them, and they are priced from £45.67 for a single handset. Now all we need is one that blocks political canvassing calls and we’ll be all set.