Barring in telephone subscriptions
You can set different barring mechanisms for your telephone subscription to limit the use of the phone and costs for the use. Traficom's regulation assigns certain numbers for certain types of services.
The regulation aims to ensure that subscribers can access additional services to bar outgoing calls, SMS and data services to premium rate services charged to a phone bill. You can use the additional services specified in the regulation to prevent, for example, accidental calls to expensive service numbers. Parents can also control their children’s phone bill by barring calls to unnecessary services.
Premium rate services are categorised by content as follows:
1) service group I: non-profit services
2) service group II: consulting and ordering
3) service group III: entertainment services
4) service group IV: adult entertainment services.
Service groups I and II may include some corporate service numbers or taxi service numbers. Services included in groups III and IV are usually more expensive services provided in numbers beginning with 0700.
In principle, telecommunications operators provide subscriptions without any barring services but they must inform customers how to enable such services. Telecommunications operators have turned their barring services into products that usually have a brand name different to the services referred to in Traficom's regulation. Barring service P1 (Traficom’s term) bars outgoing calls to all above-mentioned service groups I-IV whereas barring service P4 only bars outgoing calls to service group IV, that is adult entertainment services. You can also bar only international calls, for example.
Telecommunications operators provide more information on barring and other additional services available for telephone subscriptions.