GEEKTEKSAll Calls practically free with T-Mobile, Skype and a virtual PBX
Here’s a little trick I learned a couple years ago to make and receive free phone calls from your T-Mobile myFaves cell phone plan. When we first started our computer repair business the start up costs were killing us. We had to devise a way to keep cost down. Our phone bills were especially enormous. So we decided to advertise in our local phone books with Skype-In numbers. This way we could pick a local number to advertise and didn’t have to buy and pay for the maintenance of a separate phone line for each area code. Since we advertised in several different area codes with several different numbers, this really made a lot of sense and saved us literally hundreds of dollars. We just set up each local Skype-In number to forward to our main business line and we were in business.
But it gets better. Our main business line is essentially a virtual PBX. We have to ability to set up a find-me / follow-me feature from within the PBX. And that is precisely what we did. This enabled us to catch all of our calls, even when we were not in the office because the call would eventually forward to an open line to one of our technicians in the field. But we were then still forced to pay for all the cell phone bills. Now here’s the little secret, we found that all Skype forwarded calls carried the same CID. Our technicians were all equipped with T-mobile phones and plans. Eventually, T-mobile adopted the myFaves plan feature which of course we jumped on. We added the Skype CID to all of our Fav Five numbers and now our company was receiving all of our calls for practically free. Not only were we NOT paying for separate lines for all of the different phone numbers we picked up, but also our bill was much, much cheaper with Skype-In and now we were also receiving all of these phone calls on our technicians cell phones for FREE! We were only assessed what ever Skype-In charged per incoming call which was so small in comparison to our previous phone bills that it was just too insignificant to remember.
But what about our outgoing calls? We still had to pay for those right? Yes, but not as much as T-mobile wants to charge, which is 40 cents for each minute of overage. This cost can add up extremely quickly if you are running a business. But our virtual PBX also gave us the ability to make outgoing calls for only 2.9 cents per minute. That’s 37.1 cents per minute cheaper than T-mobile would have liked to charge us. All we had to do is set up our business line as one of our Fav Five numbers on all cell phones and once again we’ve managed to save a lot of money. All outgoing calls were now also extremely cheap. So in addition to saving quite literally $1000’s of dollar in incoming and outgoing line and call charges, we were now able to reduce our cell phone plans down to the minimum plan needed saving another $50 per month per plan for all of our technicians. And you know what they say, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Now, people have criticized us for utilizing this tactic. So let me defend this strategy of saving money from the get go.
First of all, this is not illegal. And, I wouldn’t even consider it to be “shady”. T-mobile regularly encourages, almost to the point of annoyance, their customers to upgrade to the T-mobile myFaves plan. You cannot dial 611 or their toll free number without having one of their overly-chatty CSRs recommend the myFaves plan if you do not already have it. If you do have it, they always encourage their customers to make full use of the plan. That is exactly what we were doing.
Secondly, we no longer utilize this plan. Because we have grown considerably since our early stages as a computer repair company, we now outsource all of our incoming calls to a call center. And we pay for it too; boy, do we pay!
And finally, this worked a couple of years ago. I know that many ISP’s (heh hemmm…[cough] Comcast) now implement packet scrambling technologies to interfere with anything they deem a threat to their lofty profit margin. Free VOIP is one of those services that seems to threaten Comcast a little because it is practically free. Their VOIP service is not. In fact one of the reasons we discontinued Skype call forwarding was because we noticed an increasing number of calls being dropped or not coming through at all. Obviously, this was not good for our business and we lost a lot of customers as a result. In researching the problem, I found out that Comcast was interfering with the Skype VOIP packet transmission. This is the same dirty tactic they use today to block torrent seeding. Folks, if you don’t believe Net Neutrality is quickly coming to an end, think again. Until then, I hope you find this tip useful, and I hope you save a lot of money using it!
-Kyle
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Tags: free-air-time, free-calls, free-cell-phone-calls, make-free-calls, make-free-cell-calls
. 01 Nov 07 | Tips | Comments (0)
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