One of the admitted hazards of any type of phone service is the fact that sooner or later you’re going to lose that service – whether it’s traditional service or VoIP. Perhaps someone accidentally dug up a cable, for instance, or maybe a tree branch fell on the wires or, as once happened to me, a careless technician closed the door on a curbside phone cabinet and accidentally pulled out the wires serving my home.

Most recently, with the first big snowstorm of the season falling outside my window, my broadband service went down and thus, of course, so did my VoIP phone service. Perhaps, I thought, it was the weather. At first broadband tech support said no, it was some sort of “programming error.” But it affected my neighbors’ service too, and after 47 minutes my broadband tech support finally said it really was a remote hardware problem, indeed possibly due to the weather.

The point, though, is that since I have Phone.com VoIP phone service I wasn’t struck speechless – okay, incoming phone call challenged – by the situation. That’s because of the ability to quickly and easily program features such as call forwarding using Phone.com’s web site. Actually I use what I would call conditional call forwarding. The way I have it set up, if somebody calls my home phone and I don’t answer, the call is automatically forwarded to my cell phone, and my home phone also rings again, simultaneously. Only after that does the call go to my voicemail service.

Moreover, if for any reason my VoIP adapter is off line – be it a snow-induced broadband outage, power outage, or perhaps I have the adapter in my luggage when travelling — the call automatically goes to my cell phone right away. And since I use Phone.com’s Virtual Office, I’m considering giving callers an option to forward the call to either my cell or my wife’s.

My advice to anyone using VoIP for either business phone service or for their home phone (or both, as I do) is simple – program your system now, before you lose service (in a pinch, you could of course use your smartphone afterwards to program Phone.com’s forwarding feature, but I don’t suggest that because you might not even be aware that you’ve lost broadband). As for those who might still be using traditional phone service all I can say is sorry, you probably can’t do it or, if you can, it costs extra.

By the way, my broadband finally came back on line after more than six hours. Amusingly, I got an automated call from the service provider saying it was working about twelve hours after that. Not so amusing was the fact that those of my neighbors who still use standard landline phone service lost that too, and for those hours they simply couldn’t get their calls unless they had an expensive extra cost forwarding plan.

Stuart Zipper is currently a contributing editor to Communications Technology, a high tech business journalism consultant and freelancer, and the past Senior Editor of TelecomWeb news break.

Outgoing Caller ID is an important feature. In this day and age of relentless scam attempts and sales calls it’s imperative to have your company represented properly when placing outgoing calls. I know many people who don’t answer their phones if they don’t recognize the caller ID showing up. And many SMB’s and entrepreneurs have more then 1 aspect to their business or even more then 1 business. It’s very important that recipients know who’s calling.

For example if you run Acme Construction Company and Acme Equipment Rental you have 2 different companies that do 2 different things and it may be out of the same office. You may want to save money by having just 1 Virtual Office account but it’s important to get the caller ID showing the right company name when calling out. It’s more professional. So to save money you can add a second number onto your Phone.com Virtual Office account for $4.88/month.

Something to remember is that like many small business these days, if you’re on a cell phone running our Mobile Office App you can change the outgoing caller ID on the fly on a per call basis. No need to carry 2 phones to have 2 different numbers. To change the setting go into your Mobile Office app and click Menu, then Settings. Your second option is Caller ID, click on that and select which number you want to use to make your outgoing call which in turn will show the right company name on the outgoing caller ID.

One of the most annoying things to me is holding on the phone for some big institution. If I call my credit card company I have to press over 20 buttons to reach a human being, I find it infuriating and honestly not safe at all because I usually try to call them from the car when I know I’ll have a few spare minutes. Problem is waiting for a light to change takes less time then listening to the menu’s so I end up having to either press buttons while I drive or hang up and try again later.

Now there’s a company that solves this exact problem, it’s called Fonolo and it does the work for you. When you go to a contact page on a website to call them you look for Fonolo (If they’re smart they use it) and follow the instructions. It’s can be as simple as clicking on the department you want to talk to and filling in your phone number. Fonolo let’s the folks in the call center know to call you back. It’s nearly the same for their mobile app, you pick the company you want to call and drill down their menu and click call. Once someone is ready to talk to you and they pick up the phone Fonolo calls you back and you’re connected.

Now if you run a business or work for one that has phone menu’s I suggest you contact Fonolo right away. You will have happier callers because they didn’t just wait on hold for you, you will save money by having fewer operators speak with each caller and you’ll have an increased conversion rate of web site visitors to callers.

Keep in mind there’s no change to your companies phone system and Fonolo will help you have happier customers, they’ll be in a better mood when they talk to your operators because they didn’t have to wait on hold and in turn are more likely to have an overall positive experience. Phone.com has been using Fonolo for a while now and I can’t speak officially for the company about it but it seems like everyone is happy using it, I know I personally have been.

I’ve long known that I can send SMS (short message service) messages (or as they’re more popularly known, ‘texts’) to cell phones from both the Phone.com web site and my wireless carrier’s web site. And somewhere in the back of my mind I remember seeing that it is possible for others to send text messages to my Phone.com Virtual Office number – a capability that ‘traditional’ phone service doesn’t offer.

But until now it was just a theoretical possibility, nothing I expected to make use of. After all, why would someone send a text to my landline VoIP phone, and not my cell phone?

By now the reader can probably guess with ease what comes next:

It happened.

I got an SMS sent to my home phone number.

The gist of the message was that a friend of ours who lives in New Jersey, and has only wireless service, was having trouble with the signal from her wireless carrier. She could send a text message, but voice calls were dropping like flies. As it turns out this young lady does have Internet service, but she doesn’t have VoIP phone service, and the gist of her text message was to please contact her over the Internet via an Internet Messaging service.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. The text message was sent to my Phone.com number, and Phone.com then forwarded it to me as an eMail. In other words, it didn’t count toward the monthly message allowance I buy from my carrier.

It also got me thinking about how I might use this in business, for instance if I want to receive text messages while I’m overseas without paying the premium that wireless carriers charge. What I’m thinking of is setting up a virtual number, telling folks to use that for text messages, and then have the texts sent to a free eMail account I set up just for that purpose. Then I can have that account show up as a separate live tile on my Windows Phone 7 handset (yes, I’m already running Mango), and I will get the message anyplace in the world, at no extra cost if I can connect to WiFi.

To learn more about Phone.com SMS service click here.

Stuart Zipper is the past Senior Editor of TelecomWeb news break and a contributing editor to Communications Technology.

While I write about the business of technology for a living, for fun I blog about cooking. Thus if someone asks me “what’s on the menu,” the chances are good my answer will be something like “non-dairy creamy potato leek soup,” a recipe I’m busy developing and testing the same day that I’m writing this blog.

Now, if you’re specific about what you mean by the term “menu,” I could tell you about what’s on the menu that’s attached to my Phone.com Virtual Office account. More relevant, I’d tell you about how surprised I was at the ease with which I could set up a menu, one that sounds the same as you might find when calling a billion dollar company.

Now my company right now has just one employee – me – working as a consultant. But as I’ve written before, I’m using the Virtual Office business phone service as a family service as well. That creates a situation where it’s as if I have a headquarters, branches in two U.S. cities, and two overseas branches.

What I wanted, and got, was a system where a caller gets a menu that allows them to choose between calling one of my kids homes, calling another on her cell phone (she’s pure wireless, and doesn’t have a landline), or calling my home office phone. Oh, and for fun there’s an option that rings multiple phones, and the caller takes pot luck on who answers (not something I’m recommending for businesses, of course).

My menu also includes the obligatory choice to replay the menu, and the ability to dial the extension during the menu message. And its proven so easy to add the various features, that I’m planning to add things such as rules to control calls that might ring in the middle of the night.

It does remain true that for someone who wants no more than home phone service, Phone.com’s Home Phone Plus is one of the most cost effective ways to go. But with features such as the menu capability included at no extra charge, it’s almost a no-brainer that both for advanced home use and for small business phone service, including a home office business, you need something both powerful and cost effective like Virtual Office.

(Oh, and for my growing ‘business,’ I may soon add another “office,” – a virtual extension – at no more than the cost of another VoIP adapter.)