Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
April 13, 2008 at 10:53 am

Bob,

Toll free numbers are only accessible within the North American Numbering Plan, which is basically the US, Canada, and a few small territories. Our toll free numbers aren’t able to be reached from anywhere that you need to dial a country code to reach the US. There are some dial around codes that you can use for certain countries to pay for the cost to get a call to the US and still access a toll free number here. But there is no universal solution for that.

You can also forward our toll free calls basically anywhere in the world too. It’s not even that much money to forward calls to many modern countries around the world. But it doesn’t sound like that is necessarily what you are thinking of. In terms of routing calls to different numbers you can only do that enhanced voicemail services such as Telcan.net’s Callture service. They are also good for international forwarding too.

Regular toll free service just forwards the calls to a specific number, but the enhanced voicemail services send the calls to a voicemail system that can control and route calls much more than regular toll free service. I hope that helps.

Bill Quimby

Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
July 5, 2008 at 7:27 pm

Gordon,

There will only be one owner, but it might be possible to work out something with that company to route calls from another area to a different number. That doesn’t mean it’s likely because it’s certainly not very likely or easy to work that type of situation out or to make it last. It’s not possible to split it completely but it’s not impossible to come up with a sharing arrangement. We don’t work that out because it’s harder than most customers would think. But it’s not impossible.

Bill

Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
September 1, 2009 at 3:14 pm

Santiago,

First I would use a regular phone company, not one of the enhanced voicemail services you find just on the web. They tend to be smaller and they tend to get away with more in terms of claiming ownership.

I think every phone company will charge some nominal monthly fee to have the number. It costs them something to provide a toll free number even if you don’t use it. see http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/blogs/price/no-monthly-fee.html

I don’t know too much about Puerto Rico but we’re building up the Provider section http://www.TollFreeNumbers.com/provider and trying to research things so if you search there you might find a good option. But PR is usually treated like a different country and going to be more expensive. If you can use a US number that would be cheaper from the telecom point of view, if that works from an operationally for you.

One suggestion though would be to check with WQN.com. I met the owner earlier this month and they focus a lot on international. He’s also really putting a push on toll free service. I haven’t looked at their terms of service yet to see if they are claiming ownership or not, so check that but it’s a place to try.

Make sure and leave a review of whatever company you do decide to go with in our provider section too. And let me know if you have any questions or need help with anything else.

Bill Quimby