Med-Psych.com

The AT&T service has generally continued to be pretty good, but we had some problems on Friday. All of a sudden, whoever we called would see us calling as a "Private Caller" - with our name and number being blocked. This change happened without us doing anything. It was annoying as we would try to call people and they wouldn't answer, assuming it was a telemarketer or someone they didn't know. Although I suppose it is possible someone may have taken our calls who otherwise wouldn't if they knew it was us. Anyway...

So I give a call to customer support. I go through all of their prompts and eventually they forward me to a live person. I explain the situation and they say they will reset some settings on their end and after our router gets reset, we should try again. That didn't work.

They then forward me to level 2 support. After trying a few things, he then asks to log into my internet account - and he needed me to give him my password so that he can log in. He logged into the web interface and apparently the setting there had been switched so that our name and number would not show up for outgoing calls. He was able to set it back and now everything works.

I have now logged into the web interface to find that particular setting - if you go to where your voice mail messages are, on the left is an option of "quick settings" with the last option being "More Features". If you click on that, you'll get - you guessed it - more options. One section of options is for "outgoing calls" and one of those options is for "Caller ID Blocking" which allows you to hide your name and phone number on all outgoing calls.

I still am having problems with a few incoming callers showing up as Private Caller on my caller ID screen, but at leats now if I'm watching TV the TV shows their phone number. AT&T has apparently known about this particular problem since I got service a year ago, so it is disappointing they haven't fixed it yet.