Ask HN: Best way of having a phone number? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best way of having a phone number?

6 pointsmartinald12 comments

A lot of people have hit this problem. I'd like a landline phone number for a product we're launching, but we're not able to man a phone all the time (often in meetings, flights etc).

Does anyone have any suggestions on how they deal with it?

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-Forward landline to cell -Hire a receptionist -Use voicemail -Ignore the call

I think voicemail would work for most situations.

Most landlines come with call forwarding features now, you could simply use that. There's also things like http://kall8.com that allow for time of day based routing.

+1 for kall8, set up to route if no answer to phonetag.com aka simulscribe with its impeccable transcriptions.

I have a Skype In number. Most of the time I am able to take the call on one of Skype clients - on the desktop, laptop or mobile. For the case this still doesn't work, this gets forwarded to a Skype Out number - in this case my mobile. Finally if I still don't respond or decide to ignore the call, this goes to my Skype voicemail.

We use phonebooth.com which gives you a phone number, call tree, voice mail etc. We just have the dial-by-name directory forward to mobile phones and forget the voice mail feature.

They have a free version (which is what we use) but seem to have slowed down invitations (you used to be able to simply sign up). But the nonfree version doesn't look that expensive.

I have an Ooma VOIP phone. I like it because I only had to buy the converter box & pay for it once. It's free forever after that. Includes voicemail I can check from a web interface, & unlimited local & long distance calls. The only caveat- no license for business usage.

Isn't "pay once for lifetime service" by definition a Ponzi scheme?

ponzi schemes are pyramid schemes where you use the investments of future clients to pay dividends to existing clients, giving the illusion of "work" -- not sure how this applies to a service that actually does something for you

I think he may have been misusing the term, and simply trying to ask how they could possibly guarantee to provide that "for life", instead of "for however long the company still exists".

That being said, Ooma tends to sound terrible anyway.

Many VoIP numbers can be either forwarded to any otehr number for a small fee, or routed to any SIP endpoint, or Voicemail. Cheaper and more flexible than paying for PSTN infrastructure too.

grasshopper: http://grasshopper.com/ -- you can get a phone line and voicemail service to take calls and forward to a number of phones as needed or go direct to voicemail -- relatively inexpensive, not free

never tried this, but: http://matt.might.net/articles/switching-to-skype-to-save-mo...

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