Live abroad? How to forward your US phone number internationally

About a year ago, our family moved from California to Europe. When we moved, we had to figure out the best way to keep in touch with folks back home and we came up with this idea.

We needed a service that would forward calls to a US number to an international line. It turned out this way possible, but we needed a little bit of hopping around. That’s when we decided on this system:

  1. Setup a Google Voice number
    • Google voice allows you to forward calls to another US number.
  2. Setup a Voip account. We decided to use CallCentric. We used CallCentric when we lived in the US and always liked the service. So we kept it.
  3. Get a Linksys Voip receiver. You need for Voip and cordless phones to work.

First, let me explain why we chose this route. We could have gotten the whole system work by simply using items 2 and 3. Why have a Google voice account? The reason is that with Google voice, you’re also able to text, something you cannot do with Voip alone.

So the way the system work is like this:

  1. Folks call our Google voice number, which is the only number they knew when we lived in the US.
  2. Google will forward the call to our CallCentric US number. Nobody knows this number and CallCentric offers free phone numbers in the 631 are code. But remember, it’s irrelevant since everyone will reach you on the Google Voice number anyway.
  3. CallCentric has this idea of “Call Treatments”, basically their concept of “Call Hunting”. Where you can tell CallCentric what to do with your calls. That’s where the magic happens. You can setup a “Call Treatment” that can hunt you by calling you at different numbers either sequentially or simultaneously. At this point you are probably thinking… isn’t that what Google Voice can do? The answer is Yes… for OTHER US numbers, but not for international. You see, using CallCentric, you can have it behave as a proxy for you and your US friends. With CallCentric, you can have calls forwarded to ANY number (Cellphones included) in the world and YOU pay (through your CallCentric account) for the costs. So your friends never really know they are calling you across the globe.
  4. Finally, using your Linsys Voip adapter, you can also have all of the above (minus texts) work at home through a cordless phone.

I hope you find this helpful. We have 🙂