After I nerded out and installed a Raspberry Pi with FreePBX, I’ve recently found an unexpected upside. As an iPhone user, I’ve grown used to leaving my iPhone charging away from my bedroom at night. When our parents recently had bouts in the hospital, this became problematic to have the iPhones next to us while we slept. With children in several timezones around the world, text messages can often arrive in the middle of the night, either dinging because I forgot to turn the ringer off, or lighting up the bedroom and buzzing; either way it’s a sleep killer.
Using my incoming phone number specific caller ID pairs, I was able to reconfigure my FreePBX so that the IP phone in my bedroom only rings if certain people like our parents call. The iPhone is now expelled from the bedroom, and our phone will only ring next to our bed if someone has a legitimate emergency. Yay. I just had to tell these people that if I didn’t answer my cell, try my home number.
For FreePBX users: create a ringall group that includes all the IP phones in your house, and create an incoming trunk that matches your incoming phone number with their Caller ID and have it ring all the phones. If no one answers, route the call to the appropriate voicemail, me for my family, my wife for her family.
The Do Not Disturb (DND) function of the iPhone has similar properties – you can set DND (no ring) for certain hours, and then provide a list of “exception” contacts that can break through. It also has an option that you can turn on that allows breaking through the DND if two back to back calls are received from the same phone number.
Memory is a tough thing remembering to enable DND or program it for specific times are both problematic…. 🙂