Jake wrote:If you are wanting to juggle that many numbers, I would suggest looking into a PBX (they are not as scary as you may think). You can run them on may things, like old computer that you may have in the basement, or I have mine running on a Raspberry PI (cost around $35 I think).
From there you can manipulate the numbers and lines however you want. You will still need at least one ATA to connect your phones to the system, but you could easily make all 4 phones ring on one of the jacks. I have 2 * 2 jack ATAs here to play with (4 jacks in total). One is dedicated for my daughter so she doesn't bother the rest of the phones. I actually have it set up to ring all the house phones once, and then just on her phone to give her a heads up someone is calling her. The other 3 basically work as one, but what it does do is allow us to make several incoming and outgoing calls at the same time (even on the same number).
It's not generally just a case of clicking something and it is all set up, but if you don't mind rolling up your sleeves a bit it can be quite fun. If you have an old computer kicking around it could be worth spending an evening tinkering with as the software is free.
What Bridonca was saying above is you will have to get enough ATAs to cover all the lines you want to use, so if you want 4 lines you would buy 2 ATAs and set up one line on each line of the ATA. This would mean you have to have 4 different phones plugged in though.
It all depends on what you are trying to do at the end of the day. If you just have 4 numbers you need to keep, but you only really have one main number now, just daisy chain forwarding the numbers in the online admin to the main one so:-
Number A forwards to Number B, which forwards to Number C, which forwards to Number D (which is your main number). You set Number D up on your ATA then no matter what number is called it will ring Number D on your ATA. All outgoing calls will obviously be Number D. For this you would just need to port all the number to FPL (or Fongo) and buy one unlock key for Number D.
As I say, it all depends on what you are trying to get out of it.
Jake:
Thanks for your input. Unfortunately, I do not have a spare computer and my home office is very small. I took a look at
http://www.raspberrypi.org/raspberry-pi ... s-on-sale/ and it looks like it will require more technical skills and time than I have.
Your suggestion of forwarding the numbers and buying fewer Unlock Keys, is a good one. I was dreading the idea of buying so many Unlock Keys.
Jake and bridonca:
I have actually four phone numbers:
Number A - business
Number B - fax
Number C - personal
Number D - spouse
If I want to limit the number of analog phone jacks to two so that I only need one ATA, then I'll forward two of the numbers. When I make outgoing calls, I want to show a different number between my business and personal calls. Therefore, I'm thinking of forwarding Number B to Number A and Number D to Number C. Then I'll buy Unlock Keys for Number A and Number C. Am I correct to assume that I can set up the ATA so that calls made to Number A will go to Phone Jack 1 and calls made to Number C will go to Phone Jack 2? Therefore, calls made to Number A and Number B will cause the phone plugged into Phone Jack 1 to ring and calls made to Number C and Number D will cause the phone plugged into Phone Jack 2 to ring. Does this sound right, so far?
For now, I'm not concerned about my fax machine being able to detect the incoming call, because I rarely receive faxes. When I do get a fax, I've just talked to the sender and I will manually get the fax machine to answer the call. But I do want to keep my fax phone number, in case the situation changes in the future.
When people phone for my spouse versus me, we would like to know the difference. With our analog landline, my spouse's phone number is an "Ident-A-Call" number, which means that calls to her number will ring on my personal line, but with a different ring pattern (2 short rings and 1 long ring). Can the ATA be set up so that the when callers call Number D, the phone on Phone Jack 2 will ring, but ring with a different ring pattern or ringtone?