Neat phone service?

[Fred50]

Have any of you tried Call Gate Service?

It allows you to block or allow only certain #'s or types of outgoing calls from your phone. I am thinking about getting this on my main mat phone. I'll disallow all long distance, international, 900, etc. It will accept any incoming call.

What do you guys think?

[Lar Hylobates]

I am confused to the purpose of this service. Bottom line if you are trying to restrict employee usage...if there is a phone they will abuse it.

I just made my phone a payphone. There are a couple of free calls but most of them come to me.

[CharlieS]

I simply specified that I wanted NO long distance carrier. Without a carrier, all calls long distance receive a busy signal.

Works for me.

Charlie

[Fred50]

Charlie,

What do you do if a call to your cell or home # is long distance?

[CharlieS]

It doesn't apply to me, but I have some ideas.

First, consider getting one of the cheap 800 number services. These can be forwarded to any phone that you specify and are not very expensive. Check the web, as well as your home or cell carrier. This way, you can be contacted, but LD is still unavailable to other numbers.

The second is to get a cheap calling card. 800 numbers still go through my system. I but AT&T cards at Sam's Club for about 4 cents a minute, that I use when I am traveling. I also use this when I am at the mat and need to make a LD call.

Charlie

[Fred50]

Thanks Charlie, but...

I have a cell phone, so LD for me is not an issue generally. I definitely do not want to give the attendants a calling card.

With the 800 service, I'd have to change the forwarding # depending on where I am - home, office, somewhere else. That sounds like a pain in the butt.
The alarm monitoring # is also long distance, so that blows the theory as well. That obviously has to be automatic.

I just thought of another angle: Is it possible to use the dial-around #'s to charge a call to your # even if most LDs calls are blocked? For example, the attendant dials 10-10-220 and it charges a LD call to your bill. Does it work that way? Am I overthinking this one?

I'm just concerned that an attendant can run up a whopper of a phone bill before I knew what hit me.

I guess that there is no way to control excessive incoming calls from friends & family which in theory can be an even greater expense - in lost productivity, that is. I guess I'll just have to keep an eye on the camera system when I'm not there.

[Lar Hylobates]

I had the long distance as in "no carrier" on a phone once. We could easily access At&t through the dial around 1010, etc. The bill came several months later.

I think this is the way it works. If you don't want a payphone, there is a mechanism that you can buy very inexpensively that installs within the phone jack. It is a small computerized device that will not allow the user to dial anything that you don't desire. The other telephone access, such as your alarm can be wired directly through another jack in an effort to bypass this inline device. It can be found at payphone.com