At the risk of making Tim think to himself "Can't we EVER make these people happy?", and knowing that this question has been discussed before (several times), I'll ask it again......

Since the cutover to the new simul ring system, I haven't seen too many comments about problems for a month or so. Could it possibly be time to expand the number of simul ring callees by one to a total of three (the Voipo line plus 2 additional called numbers? I'm speaking here of true simultaneous ringing of all phones, rather than sequential ring.

I'll give my scenario. When we leave the house, we always forward the Voipo line to our two cell phones. Since we can't currently simul ring to two cell phones, we forward the Voipo line to Google Voice, which does support simul ring.

This method works pretty well, except for 2 or 3 issues:

1) Google Voice is an additional point of failure, and Google services in general have been known to have some spectacular failures.

2) It takes a while to figure out where messages may have been left - the cell phone, Voipo or Google Voice. And by the way, EACH of these voicemail systems operate just differently enough to drive us crazy when we try to check for messages. (Let's see, do I push "0" or "*" while the message is playing to get to voicemail? etc.)

3) When I forget to unforward the Voipo line when I get back home I'm screwed, because an inbound call to a forwarded Voipo line doesn't ring locally. It may be hours, days or weeks before my mistake is discovered, and another several days to get myself out of the doghouse .

I realize that there are work-arounds for some of these issues - for example I could disable voicemail on the cellphones. But my wife and I call each other directly from cellphone to cellphone when we are out, and when we're in poor signal areas (common on AT&T in central Florida) sometimes we have to leave messages. Yes, we could call to the Voipo or GV number, but then it wouldn't be a free call, and we'd be back to trying to figure out which VM system the message was left on.

All of the above issues could be resolved if the simul ring feature could ring the Voipo number and two additional phones simultaniously. Then I could dump Google Voice, reduce the voicemail system count by one, always have my local phone ring, and live happily ever after.

Gary Sanders