Initiate a phone call remotely?

[Michael R N Dolbear]

polygonum wrote

If no calls are charged, true. But there are still mobile, special 08xx and international calls not included in such add-ons.

[Michael R N Dolbear]

Roger Mills wrote

Last time this came up somebody suggested use of a BT telephone charge card the charges from which counted as chargable calls.

Has this now vanished ?

Suppose you have Call Minder with a text message, chargable to your bill, every time a message is left. That should work but Call Minder is charged at £3.15/ month.

Some answering machine phones may have an equivalent feature.

The poster's insurance company would probably be happier if there was a monthly visitor and they could make the phone calls to confirm their visits.

Any other ideas ?

[John Rumm]

If I were doing this with my router (2830 mentioned elsewhere), I would have it register with a SIP account that allocates a real phone number. This will allow one to dial into the router via a PSTN call to the VoIP number. The router could then be configured to relay incoming calls to a POTS number of your choice. So in effect you place a phone call that originates on the PSTN (or mobile networks), gets shifted onto VoIP by the SIP provider of choice, the router then received that "call" and is programmed to relay to another POTS line - routing your call back via the PSTN land line its connected to.

[Andy Burns]

The ATA (analogue telephone adapter) connects to

1) your phone line 2) your phone 3) your ethernet

e.g. second hand Sipura SPA3000 or Linksys SPA3102 from eBay

Normally you would use your phone to make free VoIP calls via the ATA (and a VoIP account e.g. sipgate) over the internet, or cheap VoIP->PSTN calls.

But you can also use them in other ways, e.g. make a voip call direct to the IP address** of the ATA, and get it to "bounce" the call out onto your PSTN line

e.g you know your 2nd home's router has IP address 12.34.56.78 you wish to use 03301234151 for the monthly calls, UDP port 5060 is the usual SIP port

you'd make a VoIP call (e.g. from X-Lite software on your PC, or from an Asterisk server) to "SIP:03301234151@12.34.56.78:5060"

There's a few more ins and outs to consider, it's been a while since I dabbled with my ATA in that way, but here's some more hints

** you might need to use dyndns if you don't have a static IP address, and you'd probably need to use port forwarding in the router's firewall, you also want to only allow VoIP traffic from IP addresses you trust, such as your own static IP address at home, or a VoIP provider, and be careful with password protecting the ATA, you don't want random people discovering your ATA and making calls via your line ... there are plenty of rogues out there trying to make their international calls at someone else's expense!

[Andy Burns]

I like it, so you could make your chargeable calls from home to your 2nd home, which would in turn force the 2nd home to make its chargeable calls to some fixed number, killing two birds with one stone ...

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

What's the cost of not getting free Caller Display etc?

What's the cost of visiting the flat?

(As someone else hinted) how come the insurer of your flat is happy that it (may be) unlived-in for long periods?

I presume you don't have all services turned off in this flat in your absence (because you say there's a permanent internet connection) so how do you check that there's been no floods, power-cuts etc?

If you can't visit the place often enough, shouldn't someone-else be doing so... and if they are why can't they ring you?

[Bob Eager]

The cost of Caller Display is what he's trying to save. That's a quarterly charge; it's not about calls.

[Bob Eager]

Better still, from your mobile (using inclusive minutes), bouncing the calls to the landline in the 1st home at a time when they aren't charged. No other fixed number needed then.

[Theo Markettos]

Oooh... I just had an evil idea. Drive a relay from a GPIO pin on your favourite lump of hardware. Use that relay to do loop-disconnect on the phone line. Write some software to generate pulses with appropriate timing. Take the phone off-hook (close the relay), click the relay to pulse dial your way to an appropriate number, wait for a bit, put the phone on-hook again.

All you need is a relay and a power transistor to drive it, plus a few resistors and capacitors to imitate a phone.

Theo

[chrisj.doran%proemail.co.uk]

Yes, you do have to make 2 calls a month. I made the mistake of getting cal= ler-ID switched on just before my monthly bill was due. As I didn't know ab= out the change to monthly and hadn't made my 2 calls, they charged me for t= he whole month, even though I'd never had a chance to use it.

In addition to the charge for caller-ID, there's the same 2 calls requireme= nt for 1571 service, and maybe other things, so it adds up.

Could you rig something on a timer to press the button on a speed-dial 'pho= ne? If you don't want to get inside it, use a motorised cam or pulsed solen= oid as a mechanical finger.

More expensive unless you can get one secondhand, there are units for the e= lderly/infirm which make an emergency call to a carer on the press of a but= ton. Their button is more easily replaced by a pulsed relay, and also they = send a recorded message, so you know it's happened.

Chris

[Chris J Dixon]

Not just me then ;-)

Chris

[Andy Burns]

And a fake green triangle sticker?

[Dave Liquorice]

For this just a resistor would do and you don't really need that just shorting the line will work. Of course this doesn't detect dialtone so if the line has gone faulty you won't know unless it's calling you.

Basic dialtone detection should be fairly easy, if it doesn't detect it it could email you. Mind you if there isn't any dialtone the ADSL may well have gone kaput as well...

[Roger Mills]

It's not phone calls it would be saving, it's charges for services such as caller display - which are only free if you make enough qualifying calls (which, themselves, can be free!)

I begrudge paying BT *anything* that I don't have to - even if it costs me a bit more in other ways!

[Roger Mills]

Thanks, I shall have to study that in a bit more detail. Incidentally, making the requisite number of calls from my main home isn't a problem because all our (free) evening and weekend calls go out via BT - courtesy of the Orchid Dialler.

[Roger Mills]

A few pounds per month - or I could do without it.

250 mile round trip. Under normal circumstances, we try to spend about a week at the flat every month - but these visits are not entirely uniformly spaced so, with monthly billing, we may occasionally not visit it during a billing period.

It's a policy for holiday homes which recognises that it's not lived in permanently.

The electricity is left on. The water is turned off. The gas has, until recently, been turned off - but the insurer is now requiring a minimun temperature to be maintained during the winter months, so the gas has to be left on for that.

The flat is part of a large house which has been converted into flats - some of which *are* lived in permanently - so the neighbours will alert me of any major problems, but don't enter my actual flat routinely.

[Bernard Peek]

OK. If OP is going to be there to make the necessary calls every other month then the savings will be about £25 per year. How much effort is that worth?

[Roger Mills]

It's difficult to justify more than a few quid on purely financial grounds. I guess I need to assess the value of the satisfaction of depriving BT of a few bob!

[Roger Mills]

This is all getting a bit complicated! It seems to me that what I want is the sort of thing that old people use for dialling out automatically when they press a panic button. Then, as long as I could pre-define the destination of the call, all I would need would be some way of remotely "pressing the button". Could probably even use a timer to do it (say) at midnight every Saturday night.

[Dave Saville]

Would you care to enlarge on *how* you get it to do that please?

And yes Brian, they do need to be answered.