Summary: Imagine Being Anywhere in the World on Business, Having a Customer Call Your Main Business Number in the U.S., Dial Your Extension, and Have the Rented Cell Phone in Your Pocket Ring.
VirtualPBX.com provides its customers a main-business toll-free 800/888/877 number (or they can port or remote-call-forward their old existing toll-free or local business number to the virtual PBX). After a customer has called in to this number, he can dial the extension of the employee that he is trying to reach, look up his name in a company directory, or select a menu item for sales, customer support, tech support, operator, etc. When he does this, he is connected to the phone at which the desired employee is located no matter where that employee is in the world. He can be at his desk at the home office, calling on a potential client at the client's business address, traveling in his car, working in a hotel room on his accounts, or traveling in Europe or Asia or anywhere in the world.
This is accomplished because the employee can store contact phone numbers in his extension. When someone dials that extension or when the extension is logged into one of the above queues, the Virtual PBX® tries all of the stored phone numbers in the order chosen by the extension owner until he is found.
Since this scenario emphasizes the international side of this capability, take as an example an employee who has been sent to Paris, London, and Berlin for two weeks on business. When he lands at Charles DeGaulle, he rents a European GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) cell phone which works anywhere in the European Union and in many countries throughout the world.
At the time of this writing (early 1999) there are basically two cell-phone systems in the world: the North American analog and digital systems (IS-41) and GSM (Global System for Mobile communication) for the rest of the world. Because of this, anyone who travels outside of his home area must rent or purchase a cell phone for the new area. Some service providers in the U.S. use GSM, but with the exceptions noted below a U.S. GSM user cannot roam in Europe or Asia without changing phones.
The exceptions known to me at this time are: VoiceStream, a national GSM service provider, and Pac Bell Wireless offer the new Motorola L-7089 and the new Ericsson Model I888 World Phone. In addition the Nokia 3210, the Nokia 6150, the Nokia 8850, and the Motorola CD930 phones are available in Dual Band 850/1900 GSM. Because of VoiceStream's and Pac Bell's world-wide roaming agreements and because the above phones are dual-band 850 and 1900 MHz GSM, it is possible to roam in the entire world using the phones listed above. Virtual PBX® customers and others who frequently travel may wish to take advantage of this service. To the best of my knowledge VoiceStream and Pac Bell Wireless are the only carriers which offer this, and VoiceStream will soon offer this service nationwide.
If you do not wish to purchase GSM service, it is possible to rent a second cell phone (for example, from CellHire at 1-888-271-1302, from VoiceStream at 1-877-OMNI-2-GO, or from RentCell, Inc.) when you travel internationally. Combining a cell phone which works throughout the word with the Virtual PBX® creates the ultimate in the business phone service for the international traveler who does not go outside of an area which has cell phone service. (See the paragraph below to learn about Globalstar's or Globalstar USA's solution for the user who has no terrestrial cell service at all or the traveler who goes to such a part of the world.)
Globalstar and ICO are building satellite-based cell-phone systems which will work anywhere in the world. Qualcomm and Ericsson are jointly working on a third generation terrestrial cell phone standard which will work anywhere in the world that has conventional cell-phone service. When these systems become operational, it will no longer be necessary to rent or own a second phone when traveling to a different area. The best and least expensive of these systems is Globalstar which will be operational by the end of 1999. There is an excellent and detailed story about Qualcomm and CDMA by Robert Poe put out by Upside Magazine.
But back to our example traveler who today must rent a GSM telephone to get hooked up. He does so and and soon as his phone is working and he knows its phone number, he calls into his company's Virtual PBX® and stores the rented phone's international number in one of his contact phone numbers. The international contact phone number must contain "011[country code][city code][number]". "011" is the U.S. international dialing prefix. Most GSM phones in Europe have a special city code which indicates that it is the cell phone net. For example in Germany, where I have personally had a rented GSM phone, the phone number was 0171-234-7831. The 171 is not a German city code but indicates D1 which is one of the two German cell-phone nets. The 0 is a German internal code for dialing cities in Germany outside the local area, and it must be dropped when calling in from another country. Since the country code of Germany is 49, an extension owner with this cell-phone number would store "011491712347831" in his contact phone number. Once the temporary contact number has been stored, it is a good idea to call into the system from a hotel or a pay phone and check that the number is correctly stored and that the rented phone is actually reached through that extension.
It is also a good idea to call in to the Virtual PBX® and enter the rented cell phone number in pager phone number 7 and to mark the pager as a "combination/ cell-phone pager unit". This then becomes the temporary new-message paging number; and anytime that the owner receives voice or fax mail, he will be paged at at the rental cell phone. Alternately if he has an international pager, its number can be entered instead with the designation "standard pager unit". All this is explained in more detail in the tutorial on new message paging. I do not know if the option paging-without-ringing as described in the tutorial is available with GSM phones, but one can simply store the same international cell phone number as above in contact number 7 as a "combination cell-phone/pager unit". When the phone rings it will announce: "[Company Name] new [voice/fax] message page for [extension owner]", for example "XYZ Corporation new voice message page for John Smith" as explained in the tutorial. As soon as we can determine if paging-without-ringing can be done with GSM, it will be added to this note and included in the examples in the new-message paging tutorial.
How about calling in? It used to be that U.S. 800/888/877 numbers could not be dialed from a foreign country. That has now changed in many foreign countries, especially Germany, France, and England. It is now possible for a person in one of these countries to dial a U.S. 800/888/877 number and have it ring in the U.S. In this case the caller is charged for the international part of the call, and the owner of the U.S. toll-free number pays for the U.S. part.
A company which also wishes to receive calls from a country which does not allow U.S. 800/888/877 numbers has a very simple solution. He can order a local phone number at his main office and have it remote-call-forwarded to his toll-free Virtual PBX® number. This is what we have done. At the bottom of this page, you will notice "1 (415) 221-6600, International voice and fax". By dialing this number, someone anywhere in the world can reach us. The nice part about remote-call-forwarding is that no phone line need be physically brought to the company's premises. The forwarding takes place in the phone company's central office, and no wiring or other connection work must be done at the company.
Not only can telephone calls be received internationally, but any faxes which come into to an extension as fax mail or which are sent directly to the company's main number and subsequently transferred to the extension by the operator can be retrieved by any fax machine which happens to be handy. The system works exactly as in the U.S. If the call to the Virtual PBX® is made from a fax machine, there is a menu option to send the fax to that machine. If the call to the Virtual PBX® is made from a hotel room, for example; and it is desired to send the fax to the hotel fax machine there is a menu option to enter the number of the machine. In this case one must enter "011[country code][city code][fax number]" since from the point of view of the Virtual PBX® it is sending the fax to an international number.
If a business traveler does not rent a cell phone he can still keep in perfect contact with his callers providing that he is staying at a hotel with direct-inward-dial or dial-through-an-auto-attendant. As an example suppose the hotel is in London, has dial-through-an-auto-attendant, and that its international number is 011-44-171-649-5543 (44 is the country code of the United Kingdom and 171 is the city code of inner London). Suppose further that he gets room number 1014. Dial-through-an-auto-attendant means that the hotel automatic attendant must first answer and then the calling party can dial the room number. The Virtual PBX® handles this case with the wait-for-answer characters, #2, and the one-second pause characters, *2, in the dial string. Thus he would call into his company's Virtual PBX® and enter "011441716495543#2*2*21014" in one of his contact phone numbers. The #2 character after the hotel phone system tells the Virtual PBX® to wait until the hotel auto-attendant answers. The two *2 characters insert a two-second wait to at least let the auto-attendant start speaking its greeting before dialing the room number. The pauses are optional and may or may not be needed depending on how the hotel PBX is programmed. In this example, a two-second pause was used; but it may be longer or shorter as needed.
Now assume that the main home office is in California. Because of the time shift, if the business traveler is in his hotel room between 5 PM and midnight, a customer in California who calls between 9 AM and 4 PM California time will reach him. During this time he can order room service, watch TV, catch up on paper work, etc.
Let us now assume that he wants go out in the evening instead of spending it in his hotel room. In this case he calls in and marks his extension as "unavailable". When this is done all calls will automatically go to voice mail, and he will be paged. (Incidentally, a call to voice mail remains in the U.S., but the page will be international if it has been so set up as above.) Later he can check his voice or fax mail as desired.
If he has both a rented cell phone and a hotel with dial-through-an-auto-attendant, he can both go out for the evening and receive calls if he so desires. Thus the Virtual PBX® lets a traveler be available at all times if he so wishes, or it lets him be unreachable if that is what is desired. Because of the voice or fax mail, however, he is never out of touch.
One final word: It was a long flight and he is very tired because he didn't sleep very well on the airplane. Or suppose due to the time difference he doesn't want any customers to call after 11 PM London or Paris time (5 PM in New York). In either case he can call in and mark the extension as "unavailable" sending all calls go to voice mail. If the rented cell phone has also been set up as a combination cell-phone/pager or if he is carrying an international pager, he should be sure not to forget to turn off both the cell phone and the pager before going to sleep. If any calls come in, they will be stored in the VirtualPBX's voice or fax mail and can be retrieved when desired.
