Using TruFon to create a local Canada number that forwards to US Google Voice

My 93yo father is a resident of a long term care facility in Montreal. It’s been working well for him, but it’s not easy to reach him. He hasn’t wanted a phone in his room, their landline phones are ridiculously expensive anyway, and he can’t manage a cell phone.

This wasn’t a terrible problem until yesterday. For most of the past few months he’s used a local-only phone to call my my mother. When she died last week we were all local, so it was easy to reach Dad. Now, however, the 3 kids are all back home.

That’s when I realized there was no way to reach him, and no way, short of an emergency, for him to reach us. Too bad I was back in Minnesota when this occurred to me. Not to mention it’s, you know, Christmas.

Obviously he needs to get a phone in his room (like it or not, alas) - but that would still be expensive to use long distance and it will take weeks to install. So I went looking for a local number he could use. 

Not surprisingly, given the Comcast-like state of all Canadian telecoms, you can’t get a Skype number in Canada. You can, however, use any one of about a dozen VOIP / DID Service Providers (DIDSP) to create a local Montreal number that forwards to a US Skype account or to any phone.

After a quick scan I divided the Canadian DIDSP market into short lifespan bottom feeders ($2-3/month), business market vendors ($20-$40/mo) and a few in the middle. Based largely on the plausible pricing, cancellation policy [1], and web site quality I chose VirtuFon and signed up for a $11/month Montreal number with 1,000 metered minutes and a 10 day “trial period” (can cancel without fee). [2]

I had to provide a credit card number, so I used my AMEX card — largely because of their fraud tracking and customer support. With most online vendors one has to assume credentials will be stolen — I doubt VirtuFon can withstand a modern hack.

It took only a few minutes to create a local Montreal number that forwards to my Minnesota Google Voice number. The number was immediately active with quite decent sound quality and latency. I was able to pass it on the nursing station at my father’s facility; about two hours later my cell rang. His call went from my Montreal VirtuFon DIDSP number to my Minneapolis Google Voice number to my Saint Paul iPhone.

It was a good conversation.

- fn -

[1] "Service is provided on a month-to-month basis. You are not obligated to a multi-month contract. To cancel service, simply click on the [Add / Cancel Services] link in the account management area of this website.” 

[2] VirtuFon’s marketing emphasizes using them as a gateway to Skype, which costs only $6/m. For various reasons I wanted to use my GV number instead.

Canadian mobile for Americans: A primer. (Koodo, Google Voice/Hangout)

It is hard for Americans to understand how awful Canada’s mobile and Internet options are. Imagine that your only option for cell and net access was the equivalent of Comcast. That gets  you half way there. Now double the cost.

Canada’s lousy net/mobile situation probably explains part of why, when I travel to Quebec, the web experience feels more like 1998 than 2014 (language requirements don’t help).

Why is it so bad and why don’t Canadians scream more? Geography always factors into Canadian economics - a country that’s 5,000 miles wide, 100 miles high, thinly populated, and sitting atop a monster, is always gonna have weird markets. There’s also culture — Canadians don’t whine enough. (We Americans lead the world in whining, wailing, and complaining. Gotta be good at something.) And maybe a bit of a Blackberry hangover. [2]

It’s so bad now even Canadians are getting fed up. There are rumblings about turning net/mobile access into a regulated utility — some of my relatives think Rogers and Shaw are getting nervous. We’ll see. Canadians can tolerate a lot of abuse.

This is on my mind now because I’m trying to figure out the best options for my sister.

I currently have her on an American AT&T iPhone 4 [1] and a $17/mo Virgin Mobile prepaid plan (Virgin is a Rogers MVNO). On her plan voice costs 0.40/min (!) and she gets 100MB a month of data (iMessage, Facebook, email). This plan costs about 4 times my kids H2O wireless plan and delivers less value [3]. It’s not great and she needs voice services [4]. 

Koodo, a Telus MVNO, seems to be the value choice (the dread CDMA acronym appears). The IMEI for my sister’s AT&T 4 passed the Koodo compatibility test, so it’s possible her current/future AT&T 4/4s would work with their SIM.

Looking at the options, and starting with these assumptions…

1. 500+ min of talk
2. No home internet service (so tethering [7], which is supported, is the only way to use, say, an old 32bit Mac Mini running Snow Leopard [5])

I end up with, tentatively [9], two Koodo options [6]. One caveat — Koodo, weirdly, does not support Canada’s Interac system for making payment [9].

1. Postpaid: $60-$70 month (1-2GB) + fees
2. Prepaid:  $90 (at time of purchase a 13% HST is typically paid)
1. $35: text and unlimited incoming calls
2. $30: data (1 GB)
3. $25: 500 anytime minutes

Which brings me to Google Hangout/Voice. Having GV on her phone would provide some nice cost-saving options. Alas, even though Google has .ca domain documentation on Google Voice, neither GV nor Hangout are available in Canada (nor Skype!). One workaround uses a US Skype number to full Google, but of course that would give her a US number — not terribly useful actually [8]. Sigh.

So I think it’s going to be Koodo — either postpaid or prepaid depending on hidden fees with postpaid.

 - fn -

[1] The 4 (soon to be 4s) has been compatible with Rogers/Virgin frequency. I recently tried my unlocked AT&T 5s with a Virgin SIM however and the data service failed completely — I don’t know if this was due to Virgin’s fragile infrastructure or a frequency problem with the 5s chips.

[2] More culture. Canadians love BlackBerry, the little company that could. It’s dead now, but Canadians are a loyal bunch. So their expectations of mobile are kind of 2005.

[3] One twist — in Canada some cell plans don’t use minutes for incoming calls. Some do. Koodo does on some plans at some times. Complex, but if you know the rules you can text and ask someone to call and thus talk for free. Koodo’s old crappy website has an “unlimited incoming call” add-on for about $10/mo - but it’s unclickable on a modern browser. By the way, the website offers the same add-on for unlimited minute plans — where it adds no value. I wonder how many are paying an extra $10/mo to Koodo.

[4] If we cancel her home phone she needs 500+ minutes of talk a week.

[5] The best desktop device/OS combination Apple ever made — before the mediocrity hit. You can’t buy something as good today though there are obvious security issues with such an old OS.

[6] In US postpaid plans there are many hidden fees and taxes. I don’t know if that’s true in Canada, but in some provinces taxes add 25% to costs. I know the Virgin prepaid plan has no additional taxes, I assume that’s true of Koodo too. Makes prepaid/postpaid comparison harder.

[7] Desktop OS are not made for tethering — they randomly suck volumes of data. Modern “cloud” devices are big offenders, so a pre-iCloud Mac has an advantage. Still, it’s a worry esp. for a postpaid account. I don’t know how Koodo handles overages on a prepaid account; in the US H2O seems to just cut coverage but Ptel (Tmobile) will burn the number with a huge overage cost.

[8] The site also recommended “tellfi.com", but if you try to visit that site Google warns that the cert expired 270 days ago. Don’t go there unless you want your computer to serve Russia.

[9] Koodo’s website is broken — the add-ons can’t be selected using Chrome or Safari. There may be more options if the add ons features worked. I think the broken web site/funding situation may also explain their lack of Interac support.

Tablet WiFi only vs. WiFi/4G: $9 Android, $120 iOS

I'm used to paying more for Apple devices. I don't like it, but there you go. A 20% premium over a comparable competitor device is typical. A 50% premium is painful.

But a 1,200% premium?!?

ASUS Nexus 7-Inch 32 GB Tablet (NEXUS7 ASUS-1B32-4G) 2012 Model: Electronics

iPad Air 2 - Buy iPad Air 2 - Apple Store (U.S.)

$9 vs. $130 for cellular connectivity? Yeah, the iPad is LTE and the ASUS is "4G", but that's one hell of a price premium.

How long does Apple think they can keep this premium? I'd assumed a lot of it was IP licensing, but clearly not...

iTunes sync misbehaviors - the drive fails Tech Tools Pro bad block scan. And a new rotation policy.

It took 18 hours of disk scanning with Tech Tools Pro to uncover the hard drive bad blocks that probably contribute to some of my recent iTunes sync errors. Errors that had left me on the verge of paying $200 to repair an iPhone 4s — I’m now going to hold off on the repair until I test that iPhone against a replacement drive.

I bought Disk Tools Pro 3 years ago when my primary iMac drive developed bad blocks, so it’s paid for itself a couple of times over. Once again Disk Utility found no errors and the SMART status was “fine”.

The drive is dead, modern drives are not allowed any bad blocks. The drive's onboard computer remaps bad blocks dynamically, when they show on this kind of test the drive has exhausted its reserve. So I need a replacement.

Lately I’ve been buying Western Digital Green SATA III 5400 RPM 64 MB Cache Bulk WD40EZRX drives, a few months ago the sweet spot was 3TB, this time it's 4TB. I don’t worry about performance on this external drive — I use my internal SSD for apps that need speed. I like that these drives run cool.

I also don’t need 4TB of storage — for one thing my backup drives are only 3TB. I assume that a 4TB drive will have a larger set of remappable blocks and that’s helpful.

The 4TB capacity will come in handy when this drive gets rotated out to backup. I’m getting tired of drive failures — mine seem to last 2-3 years at best. So I’m going to start replacing my secondary external drive every 18 months. At that time if it passes a full block scan it will go into the backup pool, and I’ll junk my oldest backup drive.

PS. If iTunes were really having trouble accessing data from this drive, the polite thing would have been to write something useful to Console.app log files.

H2O Mobile and data services: the Profile is not backed up, needs separate restore

A few months ago I discovered that I could enable cellular data on the kid’s iPhones, powered by $40/year H2O wireless [1] …

Gordon's Tech: ptel Real Paygo vs. H2O with data

… H2O now allows data use for iPhones [1]. I believe this is new, I learned of it via chat support as a last step check prior to migrating our daughter to Ptel [2]. The data service requires installing a new carrier profile from an ominous looking and quite mysterious web site: http://www.locusapi.com/pcs/apn.php…

Today I learned that the profile isn’t part of an iOS backup. When I switched my daughter’s iPhone H2O wireless cellular data stopped working.  Reinstalling the profile fixed the problem.

[1] $10 every 3 months covers all the text/voice the boys need. My daughter needs about $80 a year, still very cheap. We enable cellular data for Maps, Messaging, email, calendar and a few other low bandwidth services.

OS X - moving files between users on one machine - how Apple expected this to work (13 years later)

I think my first version of OS X was 10.1 - “Puma” - probably in the fall of 2001, at the dawn of the Forever War. I certainly remember Jaguar.

OS X had roots in BSD Unix, so it was naturally multi-user with UNIX style permissions from the start. The multi-user bit has worked well, the permissions bit not quite so well. Windows style permissions have always been less troublesome than Mac/Unix permissions.

Maybe that’s why it has taken me 13 years to figure out how to share files between users without having to geek-out and explicitly change permissions (which is what I’d always done). Note that I have always kept a single admin user account separate form the accounts I and other family members use and my personal account is non-admin (which partly breaks Google software btw, Google expects Mac users to be admins) [2].

It goes like this:

1. Ted logs into Ted account.
2. Ted creates a folder in /Users/Shared with files for Alice.
3. Alice logs into Alice account.
4. Alice copies folder from /Users/Shared to Alice Desktop.

This is what’s happening to permissions…

1. The folder in Shared, and all files in that folder, are Read & Write for Ted, Read only for everyone else.
2. After the copy operation, the folder and files on Alice’s desktop is Read & Write for Alice, Read only for “everyone” [1].

Note Alice can’t delete the folder in /Shared, only Ted or an Admin can do that. (Since most Mac users run as Admin they don’t know this.)

 

There you go, it’s documented at last. Not that many people will ever need to know! Most Mac geeks run as admin, so they can probably work with the Shared folder directly.  Or, more often, they just use Google Drive or Dropbox to share files [3]. Non-geeks don’t even see the Shared folder — Apple has deprecated its use in Mountain Lion and later; Apple expects file share to be mediated by iCloud rather than a local file system.

- fn -

[1] Except for OS X veterans who have been infected by Apple’s “fetching forever” viral bug. We get someone else called “Fetching” with Read Only access.

[2] This has worked well for me, and I like the extra security layer it provides. It’s also a quick test of cruddy software — if the app won’t run well without admin privileges it’s a shoddy app. Google’s software is the annoying exception - a shoddy bit of Mac software I use anyway.

[3] We are a Google Apps centric family, so we share with Google Drive.

Troubleshooting iTunes misbehavior - move the library

I’ve had an outbreak of iTunes and iOS sync misbehavior lately. I’m not the only one.

While I wait for Apple to fix their bugs [1] I figured I’d try a refresh of my iTunes Library. It’s unlikely to hurt, and I have abundant backups. [2]

It’s a very old trick — so old I’d all but forgotten it. You just move your iTunes Media folder (advanced prefs, organize, etc). I’ve done this a few times over the past 10-12 years and it’s generally worked well. It’s really a copy, not a move, so if everything is fine you can delete your old files [3]. You need a lot of disk space of course, but external drives are cheap these days.

During the move it’s a good idea to turn off backup, especially Time Machine. Otherwise you’ll run into drive churn slowdowns. Just be sure to create a reminder to turn backup on again the next morning. (On my system this takes hours to complete, so I run it overnight.)

I figure if there are any file or database corruption problems this might clear them up. At least it ensures that everything has been touched by the current (icky) version of iTunes and all files have been freshly written to disk.

- fn -

[1] Given all of Apple’s recent software quality problems, I sometimes wonder about industrial sabotage.

[2] I’m at the point where I’m looking for hardware issues. One trick is to switch to WiFi sync — eliminates issues with USB cables, USB hub, USB ports, etc.

[3] I like to rename the original folder and let it sit for a few weeks. I create a reminder to delete it then.

Update 12/6/14

The library move seemed to go as smoothly as ever. Subsequent syncs were quick and trouble free, but only time will tell if anything has truly improved.