Ring

April 6, 2009 8:39 AM

Mobile Phone Question: can one have three phones that ring on the same number (without diverts)? Would that require identical SIM cards?

I have several phones that I've set to divert to one another.

Phone A rings, if it isn't answered after 30 seconds, it diverts to phone B, which diverts to phone C, etc.

What I want to know is this: Is there a way to get all three phones to ring at once on one number? I'm with Orange.

posted by chuckdarwin to technology (7 comments total)

Yeah, Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) has this feature. You can have it ring all your phones at the same time, and you can answer from any of them. Unfortunately I think it's still in closed beta right now, but I haven't investigated it too much.
posted by davr at 8:45 AM on April 6

It depends on your carrier, if you don't want to get a third party involved. If you're in the US, you're out of luck.

Otherwise, you're stuck using Google Voice or some VoIP provider that gives you a number that rings all your phones.
posted by wierdo at 8:47 AM on April 6

You can also do this with Asterisk and a SIP gateway, but that's pretty far into nerd territory.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 8:53 AM on April 6

As I suspected, this sort of thing is a VoIP solution (which we don't have).

I set the diverts up so that whomever is on call would be able to answer for an entire region, and the FIRST THING people did was set up voicemail which cancelled the bloody divert settings.

Bah. There's no solution that would ring all the phones and enable voicemail.
posted by chuckdarwin at 8:56 AM on April 6

nthing google voice, but I think you can only get a US number, which probably won't work for you...
posted by jrishel at 8:58 AM on April 6

Would that require identical SIM cards?

My (limited) understanding is that having identical SIM cards in phones never fixes anyone's problem, unless you're Jason Bourne. It certainly won't make multiple phones ring at the same tame.
posted by niles at 9:19 AM on April 6

T-Mobile does this. Their term for it is multi-sim (German). Ask Orange if they have a similar product.
posted by devnull at 12:10 PM on April 6