Toll Free Vonage
I use a VoIP number at home (and therefore my home office as well). For those unfamiliar, VoIP stands for "Voice Over Internet Protocol". In essence I have a box, called a Telephone Adapter, that lets me get telephone service over the Internet. For what I was paying for local phone service through Southwestern Bell, I now get unlimited local and long distance service, plus all the features one could want. There are several services out there ranging from small startups, to larger startups to companies like AT&T that offer this service. I use Vonage and have been pretty pleased. The only complaint I have after using it for almost 3 months is that when I call people there can be a two-second delay from the time they answer until I'm able to hear them. This usually means I don't hear the person say "hello". But I save a ton... And it's 3 cents per minute to Europe. If you're interested in Vonage, let me know so I can send you a discount coupon that gives us both something.

For a little bit of additional money I just bought a toll free number. I decided to do this while searching for a lawyer (more on that in a future post). One attorney that I found online had her own practice. All I knew about her was what I found online. She was active in community business issues, had some additional financial background and had a focus on small technology startups. We communicated via email, and her fee was more reasonable than the other firms I had communicated with. To arrange a meeting I called the phone number on her website. Getting a voicemail wasn't a problem considering I knew it was a one person firm, getting her cell phone voicemail was. Using your mobile number as your company's main number is bad. Mobile numbers are just that, mobile. Mobile tells me that the company could just pick up and vanish any time. Needless to say, this attorney was no longer a candidate for me.

Learning a lesson from this experience I learned that for my own company it would be important to do what I can to make things seem as stable as possible to clients and anyone else who I was doing business with. Having a national reach I decided it was important to get a toll free number. Vonage offers toll free numbers, and when I checked into it yesterday I saw that I could get an 888, 877 or 866 number. But which would be best? Does everyone know about these (somewhat) newer toll free area codes? Well today I decided that 888 would probably work out best. I went to the website to order the number and only 877 and 866 were available choices. Man that sucked. Time to try and finagle the 888 number. I called customer service and put on the charm to find some way to get the 888 number. At first I was told that batches of new numbers are made available once a week and that I should continue to check back and see if 888 becomes available again. After some more pleasantries I was told to call back next week and ask for the number then as some numbers are kept in reserve and not release for online purchase right when they become available. So I hung-up hopeful that I would get my 888 number within the next week or so. Well I just checked before retiring for the night and low and behold there it was, an 888 number. But wait, what was that? An 800 number was now available as well. So surprise surprise I choose the 800 number. Now I've got a number better than an 888 number, even better than an 877 number, way better than a local number, and soooo much better than my mobile number.
- posted by Drew @ 11:54 PM