Paul's Phone Page

I am kind of a phone geek and I maintain this page with links to the coolest phone stuff I learn about.

See the IVR Cheat Sheet - tips to bypass phone systems to quickly find a human

Guaranteed Steps to End Telemarketing

If you hate telemarketers, these three things will end them.

1. Add Non-Published Service ($4.95/month) and you will see a huge decrease in calls. Yeah, it sucks that you have to pay for this!
2. Add Call Intercept ($5/month) to your caller ID service. If someone calls you from a blocked line, it requires they announce themselves. In practice, telemarketers (who always call from blocked lines) just hang up when asked to identify themselves, since they know you won't answer. (cf privacycall device.)
3. Add yourself to the new National Do Not Call Registry. I'm not sure when this will be completely effective. I've had some readers claim that adding your info to this list will result in your getting unsolicited calls from charities, since they are exempt from honoring this list. :(

Paul's Phone Links

• Here is my proposal for cell phone quiet zones.
• Here I Am is a new utility Paul is designing to auto-program your call forwarding based on which PC you are using.
• Skype is now the giant in VOIP; they were recently purchased for a scorching $2.4 billion by eBay!
• Other VOIP: roffe.net, Voxilla, VoicePulse, Clarisys headset, Sjphone software.
• The evolution of phone privacy.
• Verizon (800-870-9999 home or 800-941-9900 business) and Verizon Wireless (800-922-0204)
• AT&T Wireless 800-888-7600
• Blackberry notes
• The ultimate pda phones QuickBase tracks the very best pda phones available today; see also MyPhoneFinder.
• Infone was the best 411 for your cell phone, 89 cents vs. $1.50, with lots more features. But as of 14dec05 they are closed. I've heard that 1-800-free-411 is free, although it has ads. :(
• Tellme has a cool IVR system at 800-555-TELL, for traffic, weather, sports, etc.
• I like the Linx Communications and Wildfire business phone answering services.
• A neat corporate service is the Parlance Name Connector.
• Verizon Ultra Forward allows you to remotely change the forwarding on your phone; from other phones call 888-294-1618 to setup or redirect. Or from your phone, 72# to enable or 73# to disable.
• Rates. I used to like calling cards but they have screwed me over recently (wiped out two $20 cards after one call each, and then having their customer support team look up my account, acknowledge mistake, claim to fix, but not fix) so I'm now trying Pingo and OneSuite which seem simpler. See also cloncom.com. Here is info about 10-10 rates; and here is more info from abtolls.
• For country codes, see countrycodes.com.
• For international travel, see this nytimes article, which suggests buying a world phone from a place such as ustronics or telestial.
• Toll free numbers from AT&T, telcan.
• 1-700-555-4141 identifies your current long distance provider; 1-(area code)-700-4141 identifies your regional toll call provider.
• HarassingCalls.com says they can trace blocked calls to you!
• Finally a place to complain about dead zones for your cell phone.
• Click and Clack say that driving while talking has the same accident rate as driving while drunk. Do you believe them? I certainly think the hands-free kits are missing the point. My analysis: when you are talking with someone who is sitting with you in your car, you can stop talking and ignore them when a situation arises that needs your full attention (they can see it too, and they can notice your attention focus), but if you are talking to someone on a cell phone, your (sometimes subconscious) desire to be polite actually stops you from putting full attention on the road. Update 08jul02: here is an article which says the same thing.
• Do you remember all the furor about the clipper chip? Some folks in the US government wanted to put an encryption chip in all the phones used by government agencies and their subcontractors, with its encryption crackable only by the government. From a technology perspective, I never understood the issue here. Let the government put weak encryption on all my communication channels if they want, I'll layer my own encryption on top of theirs when I want to be secretive.
• Google: cell phone rage.
• Cells phones on trains are radiating you.
• Reverse number lookup, else just type a phone number into google.
• PhoneSpell is fun, although I can't believe the author wants donations to support this; it would take maybe half an hour to implement this in Perl.
• Junk faxes. Why doesn't some fax service provider have a "this is junk" button on their web ui, so when you get a junk fax (very common), it reports it and bans that sender at the same time. If you know of such a provider, let me know. See more about this here.