[Marketing] New press contact phone number (softphone) after being dumped by Google: +1 (617) 500-9610

[Sean DALY]

Marketers,

Google cut off our press contact phone number (softphone) at the
beginning of the month. This follows their acquisition of Gizmo5. We
tried, without success, to keep the old phone number
(+1-857-254-1100). Google proposed to roll over the account to Google
Voice, but for US residents only, without the possibility of keeping
the existing phone number, with primitive routing flexibility compared
to the old Gizmo5 service, and no offer of international dialin
locales. Google Voice is also not scalable.

After benchmarking two more serious VoIP providers, SipGate and
voip.ms, I have chosen the latter since there is a much wider choice
of dialin locales both US and international and payment is simplified.
Administration is quite simple and very flexible. The cost is low,
under $5 per month.

Our new press contact phone number is:

+1 (617) 500-9610

It is configured for voicemail (I have not recorded an announcement
yet), as with Gizmo5 a WAV format soundfile of the voicemail message
is sent to pr at sugarlabs.org which is then routed to myself and Walter.

This setup has been very efficient for us to respond immediately to
press requests during a PR push.

Sean.