Earlier we posted some instructions for using the PhoneGnome box to cause all calls to your existing home phone number to be routed through Grandcentral.

That approach works for all callers, whether they are calling you from the regular PSTN or from their own PhoneGnome box. However, it also requires the optional PhoneGnome Find-me/Follow-me service ($24.99 per year) and an optional Internet Calling plan (one of ours, or bring your own).

Here’s another approach that uses the call forwarding service on your existing phone line combined with the PhoneGnome box to receive calls from Grandcentral.com. As with the earlier hack, once Grandcentral.com supports a SIP address as the entry-point into their service (equivalent of your Grandcentral number) and provides a mechanism to define SIP addresses as ring-to locations, this will all get simpler.

As with the earlier method, we will use a ‘direct-ring’ virtual number that rings our PhoneGnome-connected phone directly. This is the workaround for the fact that we must specify a regular phone number as a ring-to address on Grandcentral instead of being able to specify a SIP address.

Follow the instructions here to setup a free IPKALL number. Except for the ‘SIP Phone Number’ in the IPKALL setup, prepend the string ‘dr-’ so for example, if your number is 650-555-3456 then use for the ‘SIP Phone Number’ field in the IPKALL setup the value ‘dr-16505553456` Note that we put a ‘1′ in front of our number, removed all punctuation, and then put ‘dr-’ (for ‘direct-ring) in front of the whole thing. These numbers take a while to take effect. The site says an hour, but it often seems to take longer. You might just wait a day to test this. You should be able to call the number assigned by IPKALL from a plain phone (maybe your mobile would be a good choice) and it should ring your PhoneGnome-connected phone directly, bypassing any Find-me or other forwarding you may have enabled.

Once you have confirmed that the above number rings to your PhoneGnome connected phone, sign in to your GrandCentral site and go to the ‘Settings’ page. Under ‘My Phones’ click ‘Add/Edit Number’. In one of the free positions, add the IPKALL number assigned above. For more details see step 2 of this post. When you’re finished, it should look something like the following:

Call your GrandCentral number (from some phone other than your PhoneGnome) and confirm that it rings through properly.

Now use *72 (or equivalent) on your existing phone service to forward all calls to your Grandcentral number (To access your existing service to dial *72 through the PhoneGnome phone, dial ## first, as described in the PhoneGnome Quick Setup guide).

The disadvantage of this mechanism vs. the method described in the earlier blog post using PhoneGnome Find-me/Follow-me, is that calls from other VOIP users (including other PhoneGnome members) WILL NOT be passed through GrandCentral in the above scenario.

However, it will work for calls to your PSTN line and it doesn’t require the optional PhoneGnome Find-me/Follow-me service.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 5:01 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.