I still prefer the landline to report an outage.
When I call it registers my civic address, so they know it is not a crank call.
Same rational for a 911 call, they know where it is coming from.
Cell phones in my area don't have that ability.
John Ross
----- Original Message -----
From: Porritt, David
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 10:27 AM
Subject: Re: [pianotech] voip phone lines
John:
That's what cell phones are for. I've had a VOIP phone for 5 or 6 years (Vonage.com) and I'd never go back to land lines. My ISP is a wireless provider.
dp
David M. Porritt, RPT
dporritt at smu.edu
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of John Ross
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 9:23 PM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [pianotech] voip phone lines
Landline is good to report power outages as well.
John Ross
----- Original Message -----
From: Al Guecia/AlliedPianoCraft
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 8:01 PM
Subject: Re: [pianotech] voip phone lines
Dean, I guess you must have your computer on all the time to receive incoming calls. How about emergency calls at night.
Al
From: Dean May
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 5:40 PM
To: Pianotech List
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. 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
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