trim
join:2003-08-12 | reply to PX Eliezer
Re: You can plotz with POTS.
+1 vote for just porting it... |
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RockyBB
Premium
join:2005-01-31
Longmont, CO
| reply to PX Eliezer
said by PX Eliezer  :I'll have to see how they charge for the forwards... you might as well just port it. If you're not going to have a hard line, and you're in the same rate center, just port it. Cheaper, less complicated, one fewer bill to worry about, and more flexible to do stuff. Personally, I've been completely Qwest-free for almost a full year. Life can be OK without an RBOC account. Confirm with your pastor that you can still get to heaven. |
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N9MD
Premium
join:2005-10-08
Wayne, NJ
 ·VOIPo
·ViaTalk
·PHONE POWER
·Callcentric
1 edit | reply to PX Eliezer
said by PX Eliezer :said by joako :Have you considered using "Remote Call Forwarding" from Verizon. You keep the # with Verizon, calls forward to whatever VoIP provider you want. If you have problems with the provider, just pick another and call Verizon and have the number it forwards to changed. You know, that's a good idea. It's so obvious that I never thought of it.  I'll have to see how they charge for the forwards, but it is worth considering! Thank you! Joako's methodology is exactly what I've been doing with the only PSTN I still have ... in my NJ home. Since I've had the POTS number for almost 40 years, it would have been too much effort to get all friends and family to learn a new number. On the other hand, my fetish for xxx-x000 DIDs drove me to make a VOIP DID my new main home number ... given that my PSTN# is ugly, just a collection of disconnected integers that spell nothing and have no symbolism or redeeming qualities.
For around $5 per month with Verizon, my Remote Call Forwarding allows me to dial an 800 TF number from anywhere in the country (or just by using my cell phone) ... and I can change the "ring to" number within one minute on the fly. There is no need for a VZ operator or other human (or alien) intervention. |
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PX Eliezer
Premium
join:2008-08-09
New Jersey | reply to ArgMeMatey
Darn good analysis. |
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PX Eliezer
Premium
join:2008-08-09
New Jersey
·Callcentric
·Optimum Voice
·callwithus
·voip.ms
| reply to joako
said by joako :Have you considered using "Remote Call Forwading" from Verizon. You keep the # with Verizon, calls forward to whatever VoIP provider you want. If you have problems with the provider, just pick another and call Verizon and have the number it forwards to changed. You know, that's a good idea. It's so obvious that I never thought of it.
I'll have to see how they charge for the forwards, but it is worth considering!
Thank you! |
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ArgMeMatey
join:2001-08-09
Milwaukee, WI
 ·AT&T Midwest
| reply to PX Eliezer
Dear valued customer:
Verizon has analyzed your complaint. Here are our conclusions:
1. You will want to keep the number with us for reliability and stability. We've been around forever and anybody who thinks that they can do better, is wrong.
2. Those who are outraged by metered usage costs fall into two groups:
i)Heavy users who would be better off on a flat-rate plan, created to compete with VoIP and CLECs
ii)customers who are just trying to reduce our profits.
The flat-rate plan preserves the customer base at a slight cost to profits, but marketing and accounting agree it is the best alternative and price it accordingly.
3. If you are so cheap or your usage is so low that you would jump ship over this issue and go to a less monolithic carrier, you are not worth the trouble.
Thank you for your moneybusiness.
--
USNG:
16TDN2870
Find your Lat-Long:
Geocoder |
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joako
Premium
join:2000-09-07
/dev/null
 ·AT&T U-Verse
| reply to PX Eliezer
Have you considered using "Remote Call Forwading" from Verizon. You keep the # with Verizon, calls forward to whatever VoIP provider you want. If you have problems with the provider, just pick another and call Verizon and have the number it forwards to changed.
ALSO, if you forward to a toll-free number you can bypass people that use *67 to block their number.
--
PRescott7-2097 |
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RockyBB
Premium
join:2005-01-31
Longmont, CO | reply to PX Eliezer
said by PX Eliezer :Darn! port it! |
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PX Eliezer
Premium
join:2008-08-09
New Jersey
·Callcentric
·Optimum Voice
·callwithus
·voip.ms
| reply to nycityny
said by nycityny :said by PX Eliezer :So we pay for their VoiceMail three ways.... I imagine there also is a fourth way - you probably pay message units when you dial into your voicemail account to listen to the messages. Darn!
Yup. |
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burris
Premium
join:2000-08-22
Miami, FL
·VOIPo
·AT&T Southeast
·ViaTalk
| reply to N9MD
said by N9MD :said by VoIPdevotee :
...someone there is tapping into it. Great story, VOIPdevotee! Reminds me of my senior college year (1963-64). A few guys had rented a third floor 6-room flat in a house located in the downtown area of a major NJ city. The 1st and 2nd floors held the offices of the US Department of Agriculture --- making sense since NJ is the Garden State ---- and one of the several institutions within the University was an agricultural college. One of our nefarious roomies spliced into the Fed's phone system ... and for one year made all of his calls to friends and family throughout the USA for free. SURE---and now we are paying for it.  |
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RockyBB
Premium
join:2005-01-31
Longmont, CO
| reply to ropeguru
said by ropeguru :Have you thought about putting together a small asterisk system just to be a voicemail system?? Ditch their voicemail all together. Methinks not a good solution for this. Asterisk system on a single POTS line would be nothing more than a big answering machine. When the POTS line is in use (on a call or recording a message) a concurrent inbound call attempt would get a busy signal and have no path to reach the answering machine. That's the value of network voice mail -- no worries about paths into the end user location. |
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ropeguru
Premium
join:2001-01-25
Bridgeport, WV
clubs:
·VOIPo
| reply to PX Eliezer
said by PX Eliezer :Verizon does say that when a message is directed to your own Verizon VoiceMail, it's a call forward situation. So that probably does account for some of it!! Damm Verizon! So we pay for their VoiceMail three ways: 1) Hefty fee for Verizon VoiceMail. 2) Separate fee for "Call Forwarding: Busy/NoAnswer", to get the calls to the VoiceMail. 3) Message units for those calls sent to VoiceMail. That's a 3-way that's no fun.    Have you thought about putting together a small asterisk system just to be a voicemail system?? Ditch their voicemail all together. A small system on a good UPS could be kept up for hours during a power outage. |
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nycityny
Premium
join:2005-08-09
New York, NY
·PHONE POWER
·VoicePulse
 ·RCN CABLE
·ViaTalk
| reply to PX Eliezer
said by PX Eliezer :So we pay for their VoiceMail three ways: 1) Hefty fee for Verizon VoiceMail. 2) Separate fee for "Call Forwarding: Busy/NoAnswer", to get the calls to the VoiceMail. 3) Message units for those calls sent to VoiceMail. I imagine there also is a fourth way - you probably pay message units when you dial into your voicemail account to listen to the messages. |
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N9MD
Premium
join:2005-10-08
Wayne, NJ
·VOIPo
·ViaTalk
·PHONE POWER
·Callcentric
| reply to VoIPdevotee
said by VoIPdevotee :
...someone there is tapping into it. Great story, VOIPdevotee!
Reminds me of my senior college year (1963-64). A few guys had rented a third floor 6-room flat in a house located in the downtown area of a major NJ city. The 1st and 2nd floors held the offices of the US Department of Agriculture --- making sense since NJ is the Garden State ---- and one of the several institutions within the University was an agricultural college. One of our nefarious roomies spliced into the Fed's phone system ... and for one year made all of his calls to friends and family throughout the USA for free. |
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RockyBB
Premium
join:2005-01-31
Longmont, CO
| reply to PX Eliezer
said by PX Eliezer :BUT! A victim of the ol' But Monkey! Certainly this is a worth a call to your state's telecom regulators (public utility commission, or public service commission) to voice a complaint. Perhaps with enough similar complaints Verizon can be forced to bundle the forwarding in with the voice mail service. Not likely though, as that would be anti-competitive. Imagine if you wanted to use an independent voice mail service bureau. If you had to pay for call forwarding (and message units) to use the independent company, but not have to pay for forwarding (and message units) to use Verizon voice mail, then you would find the independent provider to be at a competitive disadvantage.
That is not an issue in Colorado, which is a flat rate state (no message units for local calls), where a call forwarding USOC is on every account with voice mail, but the local minutes don't create a variable charge either to Qwest's voice messaging or to local independent providers. Got skis? |
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PX Eliezer
Premium
join:2008-08-09
New Jersey
·Callcentric
·Optimum Voice
·callwithus
·voip.ms
1 edit | reply to RockyBB
said by RockyBB :Just a thought, do you have any variation of call forwarding invoked on your POTS line? If so, that would be a source of the message units. I do not use call forwarding as most sensible people would understand it.
BUT!
Verizon does say that when a message is directed to your own Verizon VoiceMail, it's a call forward situation.
So that probably does account for some of it!!
Damm Verizon!
So we pay for their VoiceMail three ways:
1) Hefty fee for Verizon VoiceMail.
2) Separate fee for "Call Forwarding: Busy/NoAnswer", to get the calls to the VoiceMail.
3) Message units for those calls sent to VoiceMail.
That's a 3-way that's no fun. |
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RockyBB
Premium
join:2005-01-31
Longmont, CO
| reply to PX Eliezer
said by PX Eliezer :There's one Voip provider that I probably do trust to that extent, but they don't offer outbound CNAM. That is incorrect. Nuvio does offer outbound CNAM. Just a thought, do you have any variation of call forwarding invoked on your POTS line? If so, that would be a source of the message units. |
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PX Eliezer
Premium
join:2008-08-09
New Jersey
·Callcentric
·Optimum Voice
·callwithus
·voip.ms
| reply to VoIPdevotee
It's an excellent suggestion. Thanks for the long post!
I think first I'll try using a different CID for my Voip and see if the Verizon bills go down.
As you know, the Catch-22 is that without call detail records, I just don't have proof.
One thing I'd be concerned about is if Verizon said that it was improper on MY part for me to use a Verizon supplied number as the CID for outgoing Voip calls.
Do you think they would have a point, or not? |
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VoIPdevotee
@clearrate.com
 from:
n1zuk
| reply to PX Eliezer
I will just chime in here and make what to me is an obvious suggestion: Send a complaint to your state's Public Utilities Commission. Tell them you feel that you are being charged for calls that are not actually being made from your line and that Verizon is stonewalling you in your efforts to find out if the calls are legitimate.
Please don't just assume that your VoIP calls are being billed to your POTS service. Even if that is the case, it should not happen and the PUC may well order Verizon to knock it off - they have sufficient information to know which calls are actually being made from your physical POTS line. And beware that if your line happens to be the first pair in a cable, it may well be that phone guys are using your line to make calls (ever pick up a phone and hear someone else talking? Do your customers ever complain of getting busy signals when there is no one on the line?) or it's even possible that your line runs through a basement of another building (especially if you are in a commercial district) and someone there is tapping into it.
I'll tell you a little story to illustrate that point: Many years ago I knew a guy who worked at a long-defunct radio station in a small town, and he told me this tale: The radio station studio and offices happened to be in rented space in the basement of a medical clinic building that was right behind a hospital. For lord only know what reason, GTE had put the switching equipment for the hospital in the basement of that same building - along with a test extension for the hospital PBX conveniently hanging on the wall - in a room that was also used as a sales office for the radio station. This was in the days before the commercial Internet when computer bulletin board systems were just taking off, and the station manager liked to BBS at night, but there were no local BBS's in that town. But somehow he figured out that the hospital had a foreign exchange line to a nearby larger city, so at night he'd plug into their line, program the computer to dial the code for the FX line and then the number, and log into his favorite BBS. Probably fortunately for the hospital, the radio station didn't last all that long (owner got pinched in some kind of swindle and just up and disappeared, leaving employees and creditors alike in the lurch, not to mention probably violating a bunch of FCC regulations about just taking a station off the air without notice) but after I heard that story I always wondered what kind of charges the hospital was getting for that FX line. Point was, although in this case the hospital actually did own the building, their lines passed through a space they did not directly control (and thus was susceptible to taps), and I have read in other forums that in larger cities there are sometimes pairs that are accessible in many basements of older buildings before they hit the phone company.
In most states it costs nothing to file an informal complaint with the state PUC (be careful about taking it to the level of a formal complaint, because in some states if you are an incorporated business you must have an attorney file the complaint - your PUC will be able to tell you what the rules are in your state). Fraudulent billing is something that PUC's usually tend to take rather seriously, so the phone company is not as likely to blow off your PUC as they did you (and you probably spoke to a low-level employee who just wanted to get you off the line so she could meet her hourly call quota). Also remember that phone company employees can and do tell some pretty big whopper fibs to get customers off the line, so don't believe everything they tell you. They don't care, they don't have to - they're the phone company - but the PUC can usually make them care, at least a little bit. |
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Fisamo
Premium
join:2004-02-20
Apex, NC
·VOIPo
·AT&T CallVantage
| reply to PX Eliezer
Oh, you know it's the latter--won't. After all, were you to have a subpoena to throw at them, they'd pull up your list of local calls. What is it they're called on Law and Order, LUDs? (Line Usage Details) |
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