OT - Cell phones

[aemeijers]

Well, understood, for what it is worth. Those little stickers on cold gray steel are an important source of business for you.

Anybody know if number portability rules apply to the numbers used by pagers? Just for giggles, ask your cell provider if the pager number can be ported to your cell number. At some point, your pager company WILL be going away. They'll lose their frequency assignment, or some other company will buy them to kill them. Or their head-end hardware will die, and I'm pretty sure nobody is making new hardware any more.

[George]

No criticism intended. Even if the paging system owner owns dozens of businesses it still doesn't mean they are going to open their wallet to keep it going with few customers.

[The Daring Dufas]

I just had a customer from years ago call me this morning about a problem with a backup generator. He would rather I look at it than anyone else. It's not a major part of my business now but I can take care of it. Pagers have gone back to the people they were meant for, they were very popular with the kiddies for a while before cellphones then brain implants or whatever the frack they're using these days took over. As far as I know, the number for my pager belongs to the pager company. When I took a job overseas more than 20 years ago, my pager service lapsed and the number I had was reassigned to someone else. When I got back to The States, I resumed service and have had the same number ever since then.

TDD

[Stormin Mormon]

And some of those 3,000 pounders are actually driving a car!

[Mark Lloyd]

I don't answer calls without CID (or name but no number of blocked) unless I am expecting a call. Most of them are junk calls.

[aemeijers]

I refuse to pay extra for caller ID, just on principle. The data stream is passing the info anyway, and IMHO they shouldn't be allowed to charge extra for delivering it to my end of the loop. Remember, they used to charge extra for touch-tone, too.

I usually just let the droid answer it. Not like I get many legitimate calls anyway.

[George]

CID comes with cellphones and I ported our house number that everyone had to a pay as you go VoIP line which includes CID, voicemail, voicemail to email etc and costs ~ $4.50/month.

[aemeijers]

Fine and dandy as long as you don't get any multi-day power outages and your cell carrier has good UPS systems at the tower sites. On your home VOIP, as soon as whatever toy UPS is on your cable or fiber modem goes flat, there goes your phone service. On many cell companies, their tower UPS systems are good for about 4 hours. A hardwired non-cordless phone on an old-style copper POTs line is by far the most reliable service you can have.

[George]

Yes, many cell companies have toy power backup. Our phones are on VZW which can ride through weeks because they have large battery capacity and generators on everything.

Four hours is actually pretty optimistic. AT&T & tmobile sites have their equipment in pedestals and there is only a small battery fitted. They are lucky if they can stay up one hour.

The home VoIP line is purely a convenience thing.

[clare]

Even with my cell phone turned off I can have the call go to voicemail - and when I turn the phone back on it tells me how many calls I missed, and from whom.

[clare]

Just one question - you don't have portable numbers where you are? Here, if I have a phone number for ANY type of phone service, I can have it transfererred to a new service - so no problem transferring that long-standing pager number to a new cell-phone on ANY carrier - and forwarding that number to my home phone in non-working hours or when I'm at home so there is no air-time charge for calls I recieve when at my (or any other) land-line.

[The Daring Dufas]

I don't own the pager number, I'm sure the company could yank it any time they wished. Right now, two of the guys I work with are having problems with dead and dying cellphones, roommate just went out the door cursing the infernal contraption. My pager was having a little problem so I changed the single AAA battery, problem solved. I must have simple reliable communications, pager and POTS line win every time. I suppose I could find another "Tough Phone" but I don't have a ton of money to spend on anything right now so I'll keep the little Nokia that has to be protected from gravity.

TDD

[The Daring Dufas]

I haven't even setup the voicemail on the TracFone I have, I only turn it on when I need to make a call. All I want is a cellphone that works like those ancient cellphones, A PHONE THAT JUST FREAKING MAKES AND RECEIVES CALLS! I don't want it to do anything else except be big enough for my hand and have big enough buttons so I don't press three at the same time. I think it's wonderful for people to have those lovely supercalafragalistic modern Swiss army knife phones but I don't want or need one.

TDD

[George]

Sure but isn't a pager the definition of unreliable? Suppose someone paged you when you had the battery out just now (or you were out of range)? You would never know.

The cell system would simply save that message until it saw your handset register itself with the system and deliver it to your handset. That was one of the big problems with pagers especially if the call you just missed might have meant putting money in your wallet.

[The Daring Dufas]

The pager voice mails are saved on the companies' server. I call my number, enter my access code and retrieve my messages. If I'm not feeling well, I'll turn my pager off. When I wake up, I call and check my messages.

TDD

[ktos]

The Daring Dufas wrote in news:i93e3g$pf9$ [e-mail]:

I know what you mean about using a pager. I used one for years. I'd give the number out to everyone as my home phone. They heard a ringing when they called and thought it was a phone. Several people asked why I never answered. lol. When it's a pager, you feel like no one has reached you, if the pager is OFF. Since then, I have 2 prepaid cells. One is my junk number and the other one is my home phone for "special" people. The junk cell is off 99 % of the time.

[The Daring Dufas]

I was an early adopter of MagicJack and when the unit quit working, I kept the number. For $20 a year I have a phone number to give anyone who will violate my privacy like hospitals, insurance companies, banks and especially government agencies. The voice mails come in my Email as a wav file along with time, date and number of the caller. I never hear a ringer and if it's someone I need to call back, I can. It intercepts all of the telemarketers and sales calls from those who got my number from the mentioned notorious privacy ignorers. I love the threatening calls from the collection agencies who will call numerous times a day. "You must call immediately or you leave me no choice!" The same message for a year then it slows to a trickle from the deluge it once was.

TDD