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People who are trying to call you don't need to page you. They just dial your number.
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Free software answers your phone when you're online


April 23, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   Online telephone blues: You're surfing or doing your e-mail and your 15-year-old is trying to call you from the mall to tell you she needs a ride. Or your boss is getting impatient trying to reach you to tell you tomorrow afternoon's meeting has been moved up to 9 in the morning.
   Nobody can reach you because you're online. And you thought you had already taken care of this problem because you pay extra for Call Waiting, right?
   When you're on the phone and someone is trying to call you, Call Waiting bleeps you a couple of times to tell you your phone is ringing. (Or would be ringing if you weren't on the phone, if you know what I mean.) Call Waiting is a great idea -- if you don't have a computer that connects to the Internet on the same telephone line that you use for normal calls.
   If your computer uses your one-and-only phone line and it's surfing away looking things up for you on the Web or grabbing your e-mail or doing anything else online, the bleeps from Call Waiting are very bad news. And I mean VERY bad. The bleeps from Call Waiting knock your modem offline. Call Waiting bops your computer in the nose.
   In other words, When someone is trying to call you when you're already using the phone, the telephone company is supposed to let you know.
   It's enough to make you pay for an extra phone line. But don't give up the fight. I have a solution.
   It's Callwave, a program that alerts you when someone is trying to reach you. The software itself is free -- you get the thrill of seeing ads on the screen -- but you do have to pay the phone company a small monthly fee for a service called Busy Call Forwarding. (Rates vary, and you might already be paying for this feature. Call the phone company to find out more.)
   You can download Callwave from http://www.callwave.com/. Be sure you read the privacy statement before you install the software, because Callwave will be tracking some of your habits.
   Callwave has one big plus and one huge minus. On the plus side, the people who are trying to call you do not have to dial a special number. They don't need to page you in some way. They just dial your number. If your line is busy, callers hear instructions asking them to record their messages. (In other words, they're connected to an answering machine.)
   The Callwave program picks up your messages and plays them for you on your PC. You hear the actual messages on your computer's speakers, just as though your PC had been turned into an answering machine itself.
   This is great. But the huge minus is that Callwave is a Windows program. If you have an Apple Macintosh or a Linux-based PC, you're out of luck. (If you know of a Mac or Linux program that does the same thing as Callwave, let me know.)