To port a number, simply contact our customer support to setup the details. All we need is a copy of a billing statement as proof of ownership, and the rest is on the house.

Keeping with that same theme, today we’re announcing that we’re continuing our advancements this morning with lots of new Downloads… and we’re not stopping there. From IP Phone Manuals, to WiFi Phone Setup Guides for all sorts of Apps on many different platforms, we’re got something for everyone.

So check it out, print them out, and write all over them! Visit by clicking Downloads under Support in the Nav or by visiting https://my.simplephoneco.com/downloads anytime.

If we missed something, let us know. We’ll continue to contribute new downloads to this area of our site as we official support more brands, phones, and Apps!

All-new My Account

We’ve fully rebuilt our entire site and support system to be easier to navigate, simplified all online areas, and enhanced our self-service resources– all to help you get the most from your service. From invoices, service details, or simply finding help; you’ll find quick access to all these features and more from the new “My Account” button found on each page.

You’ll also find Voicemail under My Features, after log you login.

“Home Phone” and “Business Phone” are now “Simple Phone”

We take being simple as one of our highest core principles, and want our products to reflect the same. We’re combining the best of both “Home Phone” and “Business Phone” plans and lowering the price to a very simple $12 monthly! Business features will now be available as an optional add-on feature, for just $5 a month.

Existing customers will notice a price reduction starting March 1, 2013. Business customers who activated before February 1, 2013 will keep the lower price automatically.

Lower Prices Everywhere and Annual Plans

From WiFi Phone to Hosted Phone, we have streamlined and lowered pricing on every service we offer. Also, we’re re-introducing Annual Plan for all services by popular demand, available immediately.

Hosted Phone just got Better!

Not only did we lower pricing on Hosted Phone, but we’ve added a new lower entry plan called Lite. All plans were also enhanced with bigger and better features like more free numbers, calling to Canada, and free Speciality Number searches anytime.

Hosted Lite plan is now available for small offices, smart homes, and startups, which includes 3 lines, 3 numbers, unlimited calling, and unlimited users; all for just $99 a month.

Canada is now Free

Starting February 1, 2013 all plans and service will include free calling to Canada, just like the US. So why not call Toronto too, eh?

World Calling

Calling international is now less expensive and easier to manage. You’ll no longer need a World Plan add-on all to take advantage of our wholesale per-minute rates. Find rates and country codes on our new World Calling page in the Support menu. Also, we’re excited to announce that we offer international phone numbers in over 50 countries. International Phone Numbers come with free unlimited inbound calling, and we think businesses will really love this!

Better Self-service Resources

We’ve revamped our Knowledgebase, Downloads, and Network Issues pages for easier discovery, searching, and use. Over the next few weeks we’ll be actively collecting, editing, and adding even more information and tools to these features.

Introducing our Shop

We’re very excited to announce the new Shop, with free shipping on all orders through February. From Business IP Phones to Routers at the promised lowest price, we’ve got it all covered. We’re also adding new products every week. All IP Phones are also available for free activation and configuration before shipping for a truly simple “works out of the box” experience.

Introducing Opportunities

Referring family and becoming a partner is now more rewarding than ever. If you refer a friend, you’ll receive $10 per customer. For our business partners, professional installers, local consultants, and more; we’re excited to invite you to offer our services to your customers and get up to 10% residual each and every month. Plus you’ll earn up to 15% of any product from our shop sold.

This is Just The Beginning

While it may seem like we’ve only just painted, this is really just the beginning. At Simple Phone Company we’re dedicated to providing the best phone services for your home and business. We’re investing, rebuilding, developing, researching, and hiring as proof to our commitment. We’re not your old phone company, we’re the Simple Phone Company.

Talk to us

We’re here when you need help via phone, email, and chat. If there is anything that we can do better or different, please let us know at help@simplephoneco.com.

Happy calling!

Chris Meadows, CEO
Simple Phone Company

Forward your calls
Should you loose service, forward your calls to a mobile or any other US number. Call forwarding can be controlled from any web-enabled device or computer at my.simplephoneco.com, and by calling us at 888.272.8070.

Expanded customer service
Our customer service team will expand our customer support hours past 4pm tonight, and Tuesday if needed. We plan to maintain phone support, chats, and emails until midnight eastern.

Network status
You can monitor our network status 24/7 online at my.simplephoneco.com. Our engineers will continually update that page should we experience any trouble the next few days. (As we always do.)

Update:
We have expanded customer support hours to help our customers:
Monday – Open 10a to Midnight Eastern
Tuesday – Open 9a to 9pm Eastern
Wednesday – Return to normal hours, 10a to 7p Eastern

Update 2:
Our New York data center in mid-town Manhattan is still online and operational as backup power continues to maintain 100% of our operations. Should we encounter any trouble, we will update our status page.

“A great way to get your whole team involved, or even your whole office would be to display the realtime monitoring page on a screen the whole office can see. We have a truncated display just for this purpose. You can launch it directly from the Realtime Monitoring page, scroll down until you see this.

One of our customers simplephoneco.com [that's us!] even uses a projector to display this and other important stats on their office wall! Talk about a team effort.”

What’s great about SnapEngage is that not only can we monitor chats from our sites in real-time, but we also use these to tools to manage and spot network issues in real-time. For example, if we see a large influx of customers from the New York Metro area visiting our site, visit our “help” pages, and using our chat to troubleshoot above average from these areas; our network engineers will being monitoring local ISPs for outages and issues. Even though the majority of reported issues regarding outages are with local ISPs (and out of control), knowing this before customers call or chat us is invaluable. The integrations more over, like auto-chat to support ticket, also underscore the incredible “awesomeness” that SnapEngage provides our customers.

Keep up the good work!

Simple Phone Co.

As a tech evangelist, I thought I’d share some notes on a seemingly tough weekend for anyone who uses the World Wide Web. I am going to suspect the nightly news will find this difficult to explain, so I’ll give it shot.

If you had technology problems this weekend, you’re not alone. Amazon-owned AWS (Amazon Web Services) experienced an outage that caused literally 1% of all servers to go dark. You may not have heard of AWS, but it’s used to store and provide servers to the likes of nearly everyone. It’s outage, which began Friday night and continued into Saturday, forced Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and others offline for several hours. Once the lights came back, is took most of Saturday morning to recover.

As if having 1% of the internet down for several hours wasn’t bad enough to rock the ship, Saturday night’s “leap second” put the rest of the web into a tail spin. In brief, the atomic clocks of the world needed to skip a second to get back in-sync with Earth’s rotation. The big deal here is that MANY servers and their application rely on time sync to function. (Without time, a computer can’t work… remember Y2K anyone?) Some servers needed reboots, some needed new code, others are still being worked on. The biggest effect that I could find, and is not yet reported much on in the Blogosphere, is telecommunications. Carriers around the world found their phone calls drop and calls not completing all over.

As Monday begins, things seem to be getting back to normal… but it stands to show just how reliant we are on the tech we don’t see as we are the tech we hold in our hands.

For extended reading, check out this great article by Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/leap-second-bug-wreaks-havoc-with-java-linux/

Chris M.
Simple Phone Co.

(Photo credit: Flickr’s alexbrn)

This holiday weekend, we tribute each of the hundreds of thousands of calls of our network to you.

For the rest of us at home, we celebrate with a special promotion. We’ve discounted every single service and plan until May 31. Order any Home or Business plan by purchasing our Simple Phone Box package for $19, and get 1 month free service, our new Phone Box, and free priority shipping. If you join any other service or plan, we’ll credit 1 entire month free after signup.

- Help Team

This spring were ramping up to some excited refreshed products and servers, and we wanted to remind you that we reward you for referring new business to Simple Phone.

We’ll automatically deposit cash credit into your account for anytype type of account your referrals signup for:

Home or Business Phone: $10
Hosted Phone Server: $100 or more
WiFi Phone: $3

All you need to do is activate your Affiliate Referral Account within our online profile at my.simplephoneco.com. There you’ll also find a direct link to your special page to automatically track referrals. If you’ve referred someone without the link, simply create a ticket or send us an email, and our accounts team will automatically review and apply the referral.

- Simple Phone Co.

Holiday Hours:
Special hours for Christmas weekend:
Call: Phone Support closed.
Chat: Available 24/7 Sat. and Sun.
Email: Available 24/7 Sat. and Sun.

As always, we have engineers available 24/7 to monitor our network and services, and well as support for our customers via email and chat.

Boy it’s been a busy Summer, and we’ve been hard at work for months launching our new my.SimplePhoneCo.com and getting ready to launch some exciting new services this month and next.

Enough with the foreshadowing, let’s talk about what we’re launching today to get ready for October.

All-new Sign-up form for all services

We’ve totally redesigned our order and sign form. Now it’s as easy as steps 1 to 5, plus it now officially supports 8 different languages including Spanish, French, Italian and more!

New orders are now more streamlined and processed within minutes. Check it out at https://my.simplephoneco.com/order

Fresh and Updated Downloads for Guides and manuals

We’ve collected and uploaded updated IP Phones and device guides for our business users. Also, we’ve added all the official welcome and setup guides that ship for all our different customers. Check them out at https://my.simplephoneco.com/downloads.php today!

Updated Product Pages

As you may know, we shape every product and service we offer mostly from feedback and suggestions form our customers. We are excited to say that have updated each of our product pages with better details, and added new addon features. We also added a complete feature list and tech spec for each product we offer. Check them out at their respective pages from http://simplephoneco.com/Services.html

Easier to understand billing dates:

Lastly, and also influenced by customer feedback, we’ve simplified all billing dates. In our previous billing system, we issued and made due invoices on the day they were issued. We did not have late notices, and we often found customer month’s behind without knowing they owed. Here is how our new billing dates work:

Invoices Created: An invoice is created 7 days before it’s due. If your prefer Mail in Payment, we’ll print and mail your bill.
Invoice Due Date: Invoices are due 7 after the invoice was created.
1st Late Notice: Invoices are considered late 14 days after they are due.

We offer lots of different ways to pay. Contact our Help Team by phone or email to update your preferred payment method.. We offer “Mail in Payment”, auto-pay, Credit Card, eCheck, and PayPal. If your preferred payment method is “Mail in Payment”, you will never be charged without manually submitting payment by check or online, even if you have a credit card or eCheck on file.

As always, thank you for your business. If you have have feedback or comments, we’d love to listen. Contact us anytime at help@simplephoneco.com or 888.272.8070.

- Help Team