More Easy Fun With Telephony

Recently I decided I needed a little more flexibility with my phone situation.  Years ago I was carrying two cell phones and had three Vonage lines while running my own business.  This got consolidated down to a single iPhone, but that can be a little problematic particularly if you’re calling to/from international numbers.  This week I ported my iPhone number to Google Voice (within 24 hours too), and got a new phone number for my cell that I’m hoping to keep private and function as a throwaway.  However, I needed a bit more flexibility on some of the things I wanted to do, so I threw Tropo into the mix.  Twilio lost out because Tropo provides free inbound and outbound calling.So here’s the path when you call my number:  call comes into Google Voice, which forwards the call to my Tropo application, which then plays a menu and you can either punch out to Sentry’s main number or continue to ring my cell.  Text messages are forwarded by Google Voice, and the net result is that for inbound calls, I’ve effectively decoupled the phone number I’ve had for seven years from any handset or location and added a whole bunch of flexibility.It’s almost eerie how much power Tropo gives you over your telecom setup.  With a few lines of code I can transfer calls, accept inbound international calls with a local number, kick out text messages, provide a menu, have their computer voice speak any text I want, etc.  Call quality is crystal clear through both Google and Tropo, and I have yet to have any reliability problems.  In 2004 we thought it was amazing replacing a 150k Avaya PBX with Asterisk, but this is replacing all of that with about twenty lines of code.  For free.  With no setup or ongoing hardware or maintenance costs.I’d say the only real drawback to the situation is the inability to spoof outbound caller id with native dialing – it would be interesting to see if Apple allows you too hook other providers into it’s native dialer (yeah right) or if this is a feature within Android.  It definitely needs to be implemented at some point – and then we’d have true telecom nirvana.