Is it safe to presume that the service is restricted to the US?
And Canada!
Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
21–30 of 149 posts
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#22Other commenters have touched on this as well, but I'd be really interested in seeing a breakdown comparison between this and GV. Clearly they're different, but I'd be interested in explicitly seeing what PJ is not . Really cool idea, though. Not sure I need it right now, but bookmarked. On a superficial note, the website looks like it was thrown together in minutes, and I think it's actually really refreshing. It ho…
Thank you! I think we might be too far to the simplicity but we can err on that side for the moment and think about going closer to aesthetics people like as we go. We're devs and businessmen, not designers, but we have designer friends that have given us some great feedback (not to mention the public feedback) and I think always improving is a good roadmap to have.
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#23https://ring.to has very similar features (for free) and is run by Bandwidth.com (been in telco for YEARS). You can even get a free number through GrooVeIP to use with RingTo https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snrblabs.g...
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sort of feature is available in GV, though I think that Phone Janitor is more flexible in the way it's structured.
I really like your having exposed me to more feature overlap there. Some things I didn't know about GV have been learned, thank you! I'm going to make some notes about things I like and improvements we might get to incorporate in further development.
Awesome! I love how you're incorporating an API into your features, so there's much more room for flexibility and personalization.
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#25Hmm. Good idea, but how solid is the implementation?
- Does the voice data pass through Phone Janitor, or is this strictly at the SS7 control level?
- Who's listening in? How do we know?
- What's the service level guarantee?
- Do you have telco levels of redundancy, or is this some 1U server running Asterisk?
- Will this reduce voice quality to low-end VoIP levels? How much latency do you add? How much compression?
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#26This seems like a cool service, but you may want to think about a site redesign. The bare bones look may appeal to the Hacker News crowd, but most people may hesitate to port their number over to a company with a site that looks so dated, which in turn makes you look less legitimate/professional.
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#27This sounds crazy, but I'd have a small worry that giving out your CEO's personal phone number exposes potential attacks against other services that use the phone number as a token. Like: (1) Do you have a store-loyalty program at CVS? Can I use your number when I buy stuff and get your coupons? (2) Can I re-set your Amazon.com password using live chat with customer support by convincing them that I know your name an…
Phone numbers aren't very private already, though.
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#28Do other people evaluate the potential lock-in before signing up for something like this? This service seems great as long as you continue to use it. My fear is that I sign up, port my number, give it out to everyone like the site suggests, and love the service only for this startup to disappear in X years. The phone number used is basically poisoned and I would either subject myself to unwanted calls after porting i…
This is a good question, but there so many ways you could build this yourself if you needed to[1], that I think if you relied on this, it would be inconvenient, but not devastating to rebuild if it disappeared, so long as you can port out the number.
[1] asterisk/freeswitch, cloudy telco api, custom software with myriad options for receiving and placing calls.
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#29[deleted]
Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number
#30Do other people evaluate the potential lock-in before signing up for something like this? This service seems great as long as you continue to use it. My fear is that I sign up, port my number, give it out to everyone like the site suggests, and love the service only for this startup to disappear in X years. The phone number used is basically poisoned and I would either subject myself to unwanted calls after porting i…
That's a fair reluctance and I can't take it away because at the end of the day you'll just have that lock-in with anyone. Such is the nature of telco lines. I have the same problem (having carried my home phone line through multiple stacks). What I can say is that I can cover costs out of pocket every month indefinitely (because each user covers their telco costs of that line, I'm just covering infrastructure) and m…
Paragraphs 2 and 3 changed my mind from "No way. Never." to "I'm seriously considering this."