Service Lets Your Many Phones Ring at Same Time

It’s quite common to have at least three business phone numbers--one rings in the office, another rings a cell phone and the third reaches a home line.

A new service let’s you hand out one phone number to key customers, business partners, employees or vendors that rings all your phones simultaneously.

Simulring, a privately held Redmond, Wash., company, is launching its Simultaneous Ring service in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties Oct. 11. The service is already available in Seattle and the Bay Area, Simulring CEO Rob Meldrum said.

When you sign up you are assigned a local phone number in your area and are given access to a Web page where you manage your account. You use that page to indicate the phone numbers of all the phones you want to ring when someone dials your Simulring number. You can have the service ring up to three phones for $9.95 per month, plus a one-time $29.95 registration fee. You can program it to dial two additional phone numbers for $2 a month for each additional number.

I’ve been testing the service with my home phone number and two cell phones. When someone calls my Simulring number all three phones start ringing at about the same time, though the cell phones may ring a few seconds after the home phone. As soon as I answer any of the phones, the others stop ringing.

I don’t plan to give my number out to everyone because I don’t want to get routine calls on my cell phone. But I plan to give it to family members and key business contacts whose calls I don’t want to miss. The rest of the world can leave voicemail.

If you live with other people, you might consider assigning your Simulring number to a second phone line so family members or housemates won’t pick up your incoming calls. The whole idea of this service is to ring whatever phone you’re near so you can get your own calls.

There is no charge per call as long as the phone numbers you program are local. If you want a phone in another part of the United States to ring, you’ll pay 9 cents per minute for each completed call. You can also use it to reach you overseas, perhaps using a rented cell phone. International rates vary by country but start at about 10 cents a minute. Your callers don’t pay an overseas rate or even necessarily know you’re out of the country. They just call your local Simulring number.

The service could be a lifesaver if you depend on your cell phone for important incoming calls. I once lost mine while I was on a business trip. I was able to immediately rent a backup phone, but I had to call all the people who needed to reach me to give them the new number. If my callers were calling a Simulring number, I could have just gone to the Web site to program in the number of the rented phone.

Another possible use of this service would be if you have multiple people handling sales or support calls. Rather than have a customer reach one person’s voicemail, customers could call the Simulring number and get through to the first available company representative, even if the person was working from home, using a cell phone or based in another city.

You can also use the service to establish a presence in another city. If you’re based in Los Angeles and want to look as if you have a San Francisco office, you could set up a Simulring account in San Francisco and have the calls forwarded to your Los Angeles number. It will cost you 9 cents a minute, about the same cost as having people call you on an 800 number. Meldrum says that the company is planning to roll out service to other major cities during the next few months.

When I tested Simulring, it could only be used to call a direct number, but users will soon be able to make the service dial extensions such as a company or hotel automated switchboard, Meldrum said. When that feature is rolled out, you’ll be able to program the service to reach you in a hotel room, assuming you’re staying at a hotel that allows callers to punch in a room number directly.

As far as I know, this is the only service of its kind. Long-distance companies and local phone companies offer numerous other services--including 800 numbers and a variety of call forwarding features--that allow you to forward calls to one remote number at a time. Other services, like Wildfire (https://www.virtuosity.com) and Portico (https://www.generalmagic.com) have users call one number, which automatically tries to track you down at whatever number you’re at, but these services charge by the minute.

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 2:10 p.m. weekdays on the KNX (1070) Technology Hour. He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.