I didn't even contact my phone company. I just went through Phone Power's residential application and put my business number in there to port. I was anxious because I wasn't sure they would give me the residential rates (like the problems you've encountered). But it went through with no problem. Phone Power has online chat support available if you have any more specific questions. I did talk to them first to allay my same fears you are having. So it is my same business number that I have had for 25 years for the $10.50/month, 2 lines, free long distance, and all the bells and whistles. Powernet Global used to be my long distance provider that also serviced my vanity toll free number. I continue to use them for the toll free number because it is slightly cheaper than Phone Power. But I didn't have to contact them at all. Their service for the toll free number seamlessly migrated to Phone Power with nothing done on my part. I've mentioned it before, but you can find vanity toll free numbers at www.tollfreenumbers.com <http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/> for little or no cost. Even if the number you want is taken for a fee they can track it down and try to get it for you. I did this for my brother's carpet cleaning business and it took several months but we got 877-MARK-MAY. Dean Dean May cell 812.239.3359 PianoRebuilders.com 812.235.5272 Terre Haute IN 47802 _____ From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of John Ross Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 5:58 PM To: pianotech at ptg.org Subject: Re: [pianotech] voip phone lines If I cancel my business phone, they change my number. I am not allowed to carry my business number over. If I change to another carrier, I have to go with a business package, then I can keep the number. This is kind of buggy, since I had the number before I started in the business. I have had that number for over 40 years. So does your phone power, charge you a business rate? John Ross ----- Original Message ----- From: Dean <mailto:deanmay at pianorebuilders.com> May To: Pianotech List <mailto:pianotech at ptg.org> Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 6:40 PM Subject: [pianotech] voip phone lines Greetings all I've just added a couple of voip (voice over internet protocol) phone services and thought I'd share with you my experiences. First, I added a Magic Jack, www.magicjack.com. One end plugs into a USB port and the other end is an RJ11 jack for a telephone. They advertise it as costing only $20/year, but with your initial activation, shipping, etc the first year's cost is around $50 with each succeeding year at $20. Since activation they have regularly offered 5 more years for $60 which comes to only $12/year. It gets you a random phone number (no porting your own number at this time). A small drawback for me is that it does not have any local numbers for my area, so my number shows up on caller ID as an Indianapolis exchange. It was a little buggy to get it working on one computer but they were helpful with live support. On my other computer it was plug and play with no problems. A big plus is the phone dialer. It has a plug in for Outlook that will dial any contact's phone number with a single click. I also got it to work with Act! which I just started using. I put a doubler jack into the phone end of the Magic Jack to allow me to add a short phone cord back to my computer's modem. This enables me to use the built in dialer in Act! which utilizes the modem. I did have to slow down the modem dialer a little bit for the MJ software to keep up. (Choose Properties on My Computer, pick the Hardware tab, then Device Manager, find your modem in the list, pull up its properties, then insert this in the advanced tab: S11=100 If that doesn't work for you find a computer geek and they can make it happen (it's what I did).) Another plus is you can use a headset plugged into your computer for hands free talking. Very nice when scheduling appointments. Magic Jack is also portable. You can take it on the road with you and plug it into your laptop and use the hotel's high speed internet access. You'll have to take a phone with you to plug in as well. But I really wanted to drop the regular phone company with my business line which was costing $50/month without loosing my business number. So I hooked up with Phone Power, www.phonepower.com <http://www.phonepower.com/> . They are always running different specials, but I got in on $199 for 2 years of service. With taxes and misc the total bill was about $250 for 24 months. That is $10.50/month and they ported my business number. So I keep my number and my vanity toll free number: 888-DEAN-MAY. It was too easy. The actual Phone Power hardware is a little box smaller than a router. It plugs in series between the DSL modem and the router. The box also has RJ11 ports for telephone lines one and two. Installation was a snap except I got myself into trouble by getting a couple steps out of sequence. Just follow the instructions, stupid, and it works. A very, very cool feature of the Phone Power service is that I actually got two lines for that price, with automatic roll over. So if the first line is busy, it will ring line two. And if I'm talking on line one, someone else can place an independent call on line 2. To get that feature with the phone company would have doubled my monthly costs to $100/month. Phone Power has some other very neat features. You can access voice mail through their web site. Voice mail can also be forwarded to your email as an attachment. You can also forward all calls to another number, which I do to my cell phone most of the time. It also keeps a log of all incoming and outgoing calls. It's a caller ID on steroids. The one downside by switching my business phone to Phone Power is I'm not sure yet if I'll still get a single line listing in the Yellow Pages. I don't rely on Yellow Pages for my business anyway. And I'll enjoy saving $500/year ($1000 if you count line 2). Another slight downside to PP (though it won't be for me) is you are limited to 3000 outgoing minutes/month. Unlimited incoming minutes. I'm not even close to 3000 outgoing minutes a month so no worries. And my savings will even be more because long distance is free with both MJ and Phone Power! I'll likely keep the MJ just because the phone dialer is so handy when I'm making calls. It is too cheap to get rid of. Dean Dean May cell 812.239.3359 PianoRebuilders.com 812.235.5272 Terre Haute IN 47802 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20090218/78faf706/attachment-0001.html>
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