PrivatePhone Ending, Here Are Some Alternatives

PrivatePhone was/is a service from NetZero that provided you with a local telephone number that sent calls directly to a voicemail system that you could then listen to online or over the phone. They are now discontinuing the service as of February 19th 2008, and so since I used them I had to look around for some alternatives. They are offering to transfer your PrivatePhone number to another company, but the prices weren’t attractive to me.

So far I have come up with two. eVoice and Grand Central. Grand Central was bought by Google not too long ago, and I am currently using it. You need to signup for an account through their site because it is still in beta. I signed up to reserve a number and was notified almost immediately that they were offering me an account, so the wait time doesn’t seem to be too long (or wasn’t for me yesterday).

Grand Central gives you a local phone number that you can have ring any number of phone numbers. You are able to choose what town the number originates from (state, town) and then select one number from a list of a few they have available in that location. I chose a number that coincided with my PO Box. You can then have the number ring you at your leisure. The Grand Central website is very easy to use and makes it easy to figure out how to do what you want to do. Caller ID can either show the caller’s phone number or the Grand Central number. I chose the latter because then I know when a call is coming from the Grand Central service and I can choose to ignore it and let it go to voicemail. I don’t know how the service is but it’s from Google and so far it’s free.

Another company I found is eVoice but I haven’t used them and I wasn’t able to find any reviews on them. But it is from the same company who operates eFax, so how bad can it be?

If you have tried any of these services please comment with your impressions so that others may learn. Also, feel free to suggest alternatives for us all to try and document.