Is there any way I can have calls to my office forwarded through the Internet so it rings to my PC at home?

March 18, 2005 10:00 AM

I want to work from home. The only thing stopping me is my damn office phone. I'd like to have that number forwarded through the Internet so I can answer it via my PC at home or wherever I happen to be (via wireless).

This seems a lot easier than adding a 2nd line. Plus, if it really works, I could take calls when I'm on the road, too. I could just forward the calls to my cell, but I don't get great reception at my house, so I'd drop a lot of calls. FWIW, the phone network at the office runs through a T1 and at home I have cable modem.

posted by b_thinky to computers & internet (4 comments total)

On many of the voice over IP services you can connect either a conventional phone or a software phone, regardless of where in the world you are. So for example I have a conventional phone at home which plugs into my internet connection; when I am away from home I can boot up a software phone (X-Lite) and receive or make calls - under the same phone number as home - via my laptop.

I don't know if it is possible to route an existing analogue phone number in the same way. I suspect not, unless you transfer your old phone number to the voice over IP service (does Vonage allow this??) then use the method described above.

Probably the best method would be to use your phone company's own forwarding system to forward all calls to your new voice over IP number. But that could be expensive.
posted by skylar at 10:03 AM on March 18, 2005

Well, you could have the office pick up the tab for the IP Phone service. With something like Cisco IP Communicator, your desk number rings simultaneously on your desk at work and your laptop, as long as you're VPNed in. There are even some third party aps (like IP Blue) that put a corporate-controlled softphone on your PDA. We actually just rolled this out to our sales staff in time for their "Club Trip" to Australia, saved us a fortune in manpower and expenses.

The beauty of this is that it's not a one-off hack, with the expense skylar refered to, it's a corporate solution that your IT guys take care of. It's no more maintenance (or cost) than your existing VPN. And your calls come into and go out of the corporate trunks, so you take advantage of the corporate long distance plan, DID, conferencing, etc.

If you're going to be in San Francisco next week, I'm actually giving a seminar at the W Thursday (3/24) from 9 to noonish where we'll be talking ROI and even demoing this product. Have your IT guys call 800-228-TECH and get registered, we still have a few seats open.
posted by JayDub at 10:27 AM on March 18, 2005

I would request that your work number be changed to your home number and then disconnect your phone.

If your compnay has an intranet, I would simply change your phone number there.
posted by xammerboy at 10:42 AM on March 18, 2005

I wrote out a nice long detailed answer and left it in preview, and it's long gone. Here's the short version:

Whatever you do is going to have to be something your corporate phone folks support. I'm a bit confused about the second line part, unless both your current and work phone are so busy that you couldn't just use one line for two kinds of calls. If you can, then you can use plain old call forwarding to forward your work phone to your home phone number. You can probably even turn it on and off remotely, so that when you're unavailable you can have calls go to voicemail at work instead. But being allowed to forward outside is something that will be either permitted or not by your corporate policy.

If you can't or really don't want to involve plain forwarding over the public phone network, then you'll need to find out from your corporate phone people if they're willing to either provide equipment from their vendor for you to telework, or forward some standard protocol (preferably SIP, maybe H.323) to your home, where you can use a software phone (softphone) on your computer to receive (and originate) calls. But you won't be able to do that without them hitting the switch to make it work.

Huh, it's not that short after all. Anyhow, the major point is that the only realistic way you can get one phone to be handled somewhere else is to have the people in charge of the one phone to make it so.
posted by mendel at 7:56 PM on March 18, 2005