Recently I've noted a vast discrepancy with my home phone service. I am not getting nearly the value per dollar that I expect from other services. I hardly ever use the landline to place or receive calls, deferring most traffic to my cell phone. Even though I'm subscribed to the Do-Not-Call registry, increasingly more of the incoming phone calls are 'legitimate' telemarketing calls, since they fall under the "pre-existing relationship" exemption for the DNC list.
I want more control over my telephone, and I want to pay less for it; these are the goals as I seek to find a new solution for my home telephone.
The goal of having more control has been achieved by using GrandCentral, a service still in Beta that was recently acquired by Google. By using GrandCentral I can select who is allowed to call my phones, with all unwanted callers being forwarded to a spam voicemail box. From my computer I can listen to voicemail, arrange callers by group, and even make outbound calls. I can also connect all of my phones to a single number, so that calling my GrandCentral number rings both my home and cell phones. The service is still lacking some significant functionality, but it works for me. The service is currently free while in the beta period, hopefully the costs do not increase significantly when they release.
The second goal, paying less for phone service, is to be achieved by switching to VoIP. I am looking to leverage my speedy fiber-optic Internet access to provide a home phone solution. I don't want to sign up for Vonage or any other provider which has a monthly fee, since my usage does not justify paying a fixed amount every month. Thus, I decided to give Skype a try since it appeared at the time to be the only provider of a per-use service. We did not want to be tied to a computer to make calls so I purchased a D-Link DPH-50U telephone adapter.
I really should have known that going with Skype was a bad idea. Their proprietary protocol limits the kind of hardware you can buy: it's either buy an entirely new phone or buy an adapter, but all of the adapters require being connected to a computer running Windows. The setup works, but is not optimal. The Caller-ID from the adapter fails to show names, even though I have the names listed in my Skype contacts, and you have to dial a really long sequence of digits to dial out using VoIP. Also, it takes so long to connect using Skype that it only rings once before being routed to voicemail.
Shortly after I committed to the Skype setup, I found Gizmo, which provides the same style of service as Skype but over the standard SIP protocol. This means that the selection of compatible hardware is greater, and I should be able to find a device that works stand-alone. It's also nice that GrandCentral interfaces directly with Gizmo, hopefully I can get two or three rings before it drops to voicemail. I plan on purchasing a Grandstream HandyTone286 which is a minimalist ATA (analog telephone adapter), but seems to work behind NAT and without a computer.
As a side note, friends and family have had a difficult time with the GrandCentral transition. It seems that it's not intuitive to ask for a caller's name prior to being connected through. Of course my opinion is that if one cannot understand the given instructions, then I probably don't want to talk with them anyway.
I want more control over my telephone, and I want to pay less for it; these are the goals as I seek to find a new solution for my home telephone.
The goal of having more control has been achieved by using GrandCentral, a service still in Beta that was recently acquired by Google. By using GrandCentral I can select who is allowed to call my phones, with all unwanted callers being forwarded to a spam voicemail box. From my computer I can listen to voicemail, arrange callers by group, and even make outbound calls. I can also connect all of my phones to a single number, so that calling my GrandCentral number rings both my home and cell phones. The service is still lacking some significant functionality, but it works for me. The service is currently free while in the beta period, hopefully the costs do not increase significantly when they release.
The second goal, paying less for phone service, is to be achieved by switching to VoIP. I am looking to leverage my speedy fiber-optic Internet access to provide a home phone solution. I don't want to sign up for Vonage or any other provider which has a monthly fee, since my usage does not justify paying a fixed amount every month. Thus, I decided to give Skype a try since it appeared at the time to be the only provider of a per-use service. We did not want to be tied to a computer to make calls so I purchased a D-Link DPH-50U telephone adapter.
I really should have known that going with Skype was a bad idea. Their proprietary protocol limits the kind of hardware you can buy: it's either buy an entirely new phone or buy an adapter, but all of the adapters require being connected to a computer running Windows. The setup works, but is not optimal. The Caller-ID from the adapter fails to show names, even though I have the names listed in my Skype contacts, and you have to dial a really long sequence of digits to dial out using VoIP. Also, it takes so long to connect using Skype that it only rings once before being routed to voicemail.
Shortly after I committed to the Skype setup, I found Gizmo, which provides the same style of service as Skype but over the standard SIP protocol. This means that the selection of compatible hardware is greater, and I should be able to find a device that works stand-alone. It's also nice that GrandCentral interfaces directly with Gizmo, hopefully I can get two or three rings before it drops to voicemail. I plan on purchasing a Grandstream HandyTone286 which is a minimalist ATA (analog telephone adapter), but seems to work behind NAT and without a computer.
As a side note, friends and family have had a difficult time with the GrandCentral transition. It seems that it's not intuitive to ask for a caller's name prior to being connected through. Of course my opinion is that if one cannot understand the given instructions, then I probably don't want to talk with them anyway.
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