T-Mobile + GrandCentral = doesn't work!

I love GrandCentral. It's a great service. Free call forwarding and messaging service that records your voicemails. I have a comment line for my podcast (412-567-7606) and, although no one has used it yet other than my collaborators, we're happy with the way it works.

So when I wanted to find a way to make local Pittsburgh calls to my girlfriend (who has a cell phone with a San Antonio 210 area code), we thought adding a GrandCentral 412 phone number to her myFaves (her "5") would work. Plus there are lots of blogs that swear it works.

Well, it didn't work for us. Instead, using GrandCentral just ran up her precious minutes instead of granting the "unlimited calls" we expected. Here's what her contract says:

myFaves plans require minimum one-year service agreement and are available solely with myFaves-enabled handset. myFaves plans allow unlimited nationwide calling to any five US phone numbers (excluding 411, voicemail, toll-free, 900, calling card, and customers’ own numbers; and single numbers allowing access to 500 or more persons), each of which may be changed a maximum of one time per calendar month.

I think it's that 500 or more thing that blocks GrandCentral from being allowed on the myFaves. So if it's still working for you, more power to you. It didn't work for us so I say don't believe the hype. The blogs I've read about this are wrong.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I might test it out on my regular Tmobile line, but in the meantime I think I'll try it with my Vonage number. I'm living in Chicago for 5 more months, so I kept my LA number, but my old apartment doorbell keeps ringing on my phone! So I was looking for some sort of net based thing like SoonR or something where I could forward those intercom/doorbell calls to my old landlords HOUSE, so he'll take my number out of the system. This might do the trick.

topic 2, looks like Blogger took out option 3. Used to be I could leave a message as either a blogger member, totally anony, or list my email and website, and that ones gone tonight.

topic 3, ever hear of a group called Chromelodeon? They're kinda in your area, but disbanded.

Unknown said...

looks like that option is gone... but it's hard for me to tell since i'm logged into Blogger.

as for Chromelodeon, they're new to me. but they sound pretty sweet, covering the Mega Man theme and other video game stuff.

Who? Me? said...

I believe that you need to make a change in the way that the GrandCentral acct is set up--rather than showing the incoming caller's ID, you need to change the setting to always display the GrandCentral # on inbound calls.

Unknown said...

david - that's a really REALLY good point. thanks for the tip.