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Automatic call forwarding via Rebtel doesn't work
I live in the Dominican Republic but have a business office in Germany as well. I've programmed my German phone to relay calls to me here in the D.R. via Rebtel, but when clients dial me in Germany they get a Rebtel voice message "Enter 1 and your number to confirm that you are a Rebtel member", i.e. no calls are forwarded. This is a serious issue. I assume that the caller's number is what Rebtel receives, instead of mine, and the mechanism designed to protect me from others using my Rebtel numbers kicks in. Is there anyway to override this?
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Goyo,
Rebtel is not originally designed to work as a call forwarding service. However, if you send us your details, we would be willing to try to help you setting up a solution.
Send us your info to customerteam@rebtel.com
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this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?Goyo,
Rebtel is not originally designed to work as a call forwarding service. However, if you send us your details, we would be willing to try to help you setting up a solution.
Send us your info to customerteam@rebtel.com
The company says
this solves the problem
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Inappropriate?By my count yours is the third call forwarding post in a week. Note that the Rebtel numbers aren't exclusively yours, the same numbers are used by every other Rebtel customer as well and Rebtel depends on the calling number to determine which of its customers to route the call for. If Rebtel doesn't receive, or doesn't look at, the forwarding number then they have no way at all to tell that the call had something to do with you (in fact, while I haven't tried it, if one of your callers is also a Rebtel customer I suspect their call to you might end up being routed to one of their contacts instead). There's no workaround, to be able to handle forwarding calls the carriers they use need to send the forwarding number and Rebtel needs to look at it when figuring out how to route the call; i.e. Rebtel would actually need to provide support for forwarding calls for you to be able to do it.
I first asked about forwarding calls in 2007, and I know Rebtel has an undocumented (and quite ugly) way to do this in countries where the local carrier sends them the forwarding number, so if you are lucky Germany might be one of the countries where this works. I wasn't so lucky, I was interested in doing this in the USA but the carrier there didn't send Rebtel the number (as recently as last August anyway). I still use another company for forwarding calls.
What I really wish is that Rebtel would actually spend the effort to officially support call forwarding, at least in the countries where the carrier can make this possible. While I understand that call forwarding is about the most boring, least cool VoIP application there is, it is still something that people often want to do (three posts here in a week) and Rebtel seems like a really efficient way to do this. One of the costs of a conventional forwarding service is the need to rent an exclusive inbound number to forward through, but Rebtel uniquely saves this cost by using shared numbers and that savings, plus decent call rates and maybe even smart calls, makes Rebtel quite attractive for this, which is probably also why people keep trying to use Rebtel for this on their own.
Please support call forwarding.3 Comments Add a comment
This solves the problem
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Dennis,
Great post!
Would you mind reposting it as an idea so that people can vote it up?? We usually implement what our users are actively asking for.
Thanks again for all your support here on getsatisfaction. -
By the way Dennis, just spoke to one of our engineers, we might be able to set you up with call forwarding from USA, since we have a carrier that now supports it.
Send an email our way and we'll hook you up. -
Efe,
Thanks, I'll do that.
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