Gizmo Project Having Issues with Calling 800 numbers
I pretty much use one of two phones these days to make a PSTN call: Gizmo Project or my mobile phone. Gizmo has excellent audio quality. Skype is just too unreliable to use for a PSTN call. The audio quality is absolutely abysmal these days. I will use my landline attached to my PhoneGnome, but only rarely: I need a handset with a mute button. 
Anyway, I had to get on a conference call today, which involves dialing into an 800 number. On a majority of the calls I am on, I don’t speak too much and would prefer to stay muted. I could have used my PhoneGnome to make the call, but the problem is that most of my analog handsets don’t have a mute button. That’s a showstopper.
My workaround to the issue ended up being to set up Gizmo Project to register with Free World Dialup. I have several FWD accounts and registered one as a secondary account on Gizmo. I then used FWD to make the call to the 800 number, which can make those sorts of calls. That worked fairly well.
I asked the folks at Gizmo about the 800 number problem and they said they were aware of it. They are having issues with the provider handling 800 numbers and are in the process of switching providers.
On a different note, it appears I no longer am subject to the “30 minute cutoff” on Gizmo’s free PSTN calls. I complained about this earlier (I’d link to it, but I haven’t gotten to that article in my recovery process yet).
Technorati Tags: gizmo project, skype, free world dialup, fwd
