codyhanson.com

I’ve been a T-Mobile (and before that, Voicestream) customer for about 7 years now. In that time, I’ve been quite satisfied. Their rates are reasonable, their data plans generous, and their coverage totally adequate to my needs. I’ve rarely been tempted to change carriers.

Last November, I started a new job that I love. I’ve got an office with a view in a beautifully restored building. All that’s missing is T-mobile reception. The second I walk in to the building, my signal drops to nothing. Zip. From time to time, my phone will eke out the tiniest signal if I have it placed just so on my desk or window sill, but never such that I can replicate the result (much less place or take a call, unless I want to lay my head down on my desk on top of the phone).

Given that the building houses the University’s Digital Technology Center and Supercomputing Institute, as well as something called the Powerwall (I don’t know what it is, I just know I want one), it should come as no surprise that the place is heavily wired, probably in effect acting like a five-story Faraday cage around my poor phone.

I’d resigned myself to living without workday cell coverage, stepping outside a couple of times a day to check for voicemail, and otherwise relying on my office line, email and I’m to keep in touch. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got a beta invite for GrandCentral, the free phone number consolidation service recently purchased by Google.

GrandCentral provides each user with a phone number (in the area code of their choice) and voicemail, as well as a robust set of tools for creating rules for call forwarding. In my case, the killer feature is email delivery of voicemail.

T-mobile (can’t speak for other carriers) provides conditional call forwarding, meaning you can set different destination numbers for your calls depending on whether your line is busy, simply not answered, or is unreachable. By default, calls forward to your T-mobile voicemail in each of these scenarios.

Using conditional call forwarding, I was able to specify that when my phone is unreachable, my calls should forward to my GrandCentral number, where they go directly to voicemail, which is then delivered to my email.

This isn’t a perfect system. I still am unable to actually answer calls (although if I really wanted to, I could forward to my Gizmo Project number), and SMS messages sit in the aether until my cell is back on the T-mobile grid. It should also be noted that T-mobile caps the number of free conditionally forwarded minutes per month, so depending on how popular you are, YMMV.

That said, I’m quite happy with the arrangement. I’ve cut the delay before I’m notified of a call to a matter of minutes, from as much as several hours.

Note: GrandCentral has gotten some bad publicity recently for unilaterally changing some users’ numbers (See GrandCentral’s response here). Should such a thing happen to me, all I’d have to do is change my conditional forwarding number, but it does serve as a timely reminder of just how much confidence it’s appropriate to place in services that loudly pronounce their beta status.