Verizon’s doing weird things with my home phone again. At the moment, I’m paying for call forwarding on my home line, so any time someone calls my home number, the call is forwarded to my NuFone VoIP account. This was working just fine, but I’ve received busy signals when calling home twice in the last week. Since I’m able to call home via NuFone directly without any problems, I’m assuming that the problem is on Verizon’s end.

It’s taken a bit of poking around, but I think I’ve figured out what’s happening–Verizon will only forward one call at a time. If a second caller calls while a forwarded call is in progress, then the second caller will receive a busy signal. That’s a really nasty behavior–I’ve effectively lost the ability to do call waiting and to take voicemail messasges while I’m on the phone.

Since this is clearly happening on Verizon’s end, I called their local repair line and talked to someone. In the past, I’ve had much better luck with their repair number then their sales number–the repair people have access to the switch–but this time the agent was terminally confused by this–she got mixed up and thought that I was forwarding my calls to my cell phone, and concluded that it was the cell provider’s problem. Once she got into that state, I couldn’t figure out how to un-confuse her, so I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow and try to get a new repair tech.

I guess I should see this as an incentive to find someplace that do a LNP port of my home number to a cheap-ish VoIP service. It looks like Teliax might be able to do it, and most people on the Asterisk-Users list seem to think highly of them.