Box to Redirect Incoming Call and Redial to Outgoing Line

I want to figure a simple way of being able to dial in on one work number and then dial out on another work line.

The reason is that I want to be able to call international from my cell phone really cheaply or free. So I want to make a local call to my office and then reroute that call somehow through my VOIP phone to wherever I want to dial. This way I get the benifit of really cheap rates.

Thanks for any ideas.

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The device you want is known as a 'call extender' or 'WATS extender'. The name comes mainly from many years ago when long distance calls were quite expensive but using the office 'WATS line' allowed a long distance call to be 'free'. Essenti- ally, call in on a local line, get hooked either to a PBX-type line from whence you would dial the WATS code (then out on WATS) or else just connect direct to the WATS line itself. A smart user would always have a passcode request in there somewhere, to avoid having the WATS (or other network services) abused. I got one of these devices once from Mike Sandman and after a bit of tweaking it worked reasonably well. You can adjust it via a capacitor on the top so it knows when to answer the incoming line and how long to hold the line open, and when to disconnect it. The prototype Mike let me use was easy enough to adjust the cap for pickup and disconnect and wait to restart. But the volume level was not very good, at least on my prototype (some manufacturer was trying to talk Mike into reselling these devices), and I do not think they ever got the volume level adjusted as desired. It would not make a lot of difference on good quality WATS lines or a decent PBX, etc. The transmission level would go down a little, but you could live with it. However, I was trying to use mine to connect landline, via a PBX to a VOIP line outbound, and this was _before_ (or maybe still?) VOIP was able to share bandwidth with computers, etc on internet and sound good quality. So I had two problems: VOIP outbound (with the older style Vonage TA's) sounded dreadful, IMO, and the 'call extender' didn't help it any.

Commercial or industrial grade call extenders used to be quite expensive; you had to be able to amortize its cost versus your toll charges; now the cost for a unit is almost nothing; but then again, so are toll charges, even international ones. You might check with Mike Sandman (mailto: snipped-for-privacy@sandman.com) or check his web site

and find out if the transmission quality problems have been corrected, and does he still have those little units. (About the size of a package of cigarette, weight a couple ounces; just plug an incoming and and outgoing line into it.) PAT]