Wearing my other hat I am chair of the Tanque Verde Valley Fire District (we are a tax district which subcontracts to Rural Metro for fire protection and other services). We have a phone number through AT&T for $52 a month, and the very few phone calls we get are routed to my business number. Being frugal, and since we just need a very basic service of incoming calls maybe once a week, I'm looking at something like Grasshopper for a virtual phone connection.
Does anyone have any experience with these services, especially with Grasshopper?
$52 a month? highway robbery
I have been using Vonage for the last 9 or 10 years. It costs about $10 a month.
https://www.vonage.com/personal/features?
I ported my AZ cell number, easy... so you can keep the AT&T number you use now.
and it has call forwarding so you can use it just like you do now.
for messages, I get email with transcript and a sound file attached... so with my cel phone I am still in touch.
all you need is a good internet connection: plug in the wall wart and plug into your router.. Listo!
(the messaging and forwarding still work even if the device goes in the dumpster)
bonus for me, free "all you can eat" calling US, Canada, Mexico, most of Europe too.
for cheaper, MagicJack is similar, but I have no experience with it http://www.magicjack.com/index.html
Years ago I switched to NetTalk at our house. Yesterday I paid the bill for Oct 2016 through Oct 2017: $49 ($39 + $10 in taxes and fees.)
As long as the internet is up, it works just fine. There is no customer service. If something goes wrong you are on your own.
One thing that you might do is port the number to Google Voice. Then you can forward it to your cell phone and whatever VOIP service you choose. Google Voice is pretty cool because you can forward to a bunch of numbers at once. Whoever picks it up first, gets the call. I like the idea of capturing the number (via a port) at Google, then forwarding it to random numbers. I might do this with my cell phone so I can use two cell phones.
My wife had the same AT&T landline for 40 or so years, but in the last 5 years has hardly used it for anything. I ported her number to Flowroute and have calls forward to her cell number. It costs us less than 2 bucks a month now, instead of the $40 or so we were paying AT&T.
All that technology is good... But you have to have internet. We are 1.1 miles from the nearest landline. Several years ago, AT&T ran a little cable about 2" deep the whole way to provide service to us. The internet was DSL but painfully slow and every time the county scraped the road or even mowed it, the line got broken. So then we would wait weeks for them to patch it all the while still paying for the service. We dropped that service after a year. We thought about satellite internet but we don't have a clear view (or any view) of the southern sky. I am NOT cutting any of my hardwoods to make a view. I'm happy like we are.
