The cost of mobile phone services are an annoying but necessary modern burden. Like a driver’s license and a debit card it is almost impossible to be fully engaged in society without a mobile phone. My little act of rebellion against this imposition is to reduce my costs as much as possible. Once I had finished the contract on my mobile ( a perfectly serviceable 2 year old iPhone) which had been costing $95.00 a month + excess data charges I started looking for the least expensive mobile provider available.
There are plenty of sites that will let you compare mobile phone plans so I will not bore you with that process. After some searching and comparing I settled on Belong Mobile. Belong is Telstra’s cut price subsidiary so it has the backing of the Telstra network. Iv found it to be reliable in the metro areas and have also had good results interstate. They have very low cost plans, you can switch plans at your leisure and they allow unlimited data banking. My banked data reached 50GB recently so I dropped my plan to $15 a month. The one drawback is their lack of a voicemail offering. Unanswered calls on the Belong network are answered by a robot voice that takes a 10 second message. The message is then translated (badly) to a text that is sent to the receiving mobile as an SMS message. This system sucks bigtime is less than ideal, so I decided to set up my own secure voicemail service.
My ISP, Exetel provides an IP phone number on a pay as you go plan, so I don’t get charged for incoming calls. By using this number with the answering machine built into my Fritzbox Modem Router I was able to set up my own voicemail service.
The Steps
- Configure the Fritzbox to receive calls on the IP phone number.
- Activate the built in answering machine and set it to answer calls immediately.
- Record a greeting and upload it to the Fritzbox answering machine.
- Configure the answering machine to send any messages to a secure email address, in this case Protonmail.
- Install the Protonmail app on my phone and configure to send push notifications.
- Set my mobile phone to divert to my IP phone number if not answered.
- It took some hunting but this code entered on the dial keypad set my iPhone to forward messages after the 30sec ring time: *61*Enter Forward Phone Number#
So now unanswered calls are forwarded to my IP phone which is answered by the Fritzbox. The Fritzbox records the voice message, emails the sound file to my Protonmail address and then deletes the message. When Protonmail receives the email a notification is flashed on my iPhone and I can download the sound file to listen.
There is an app that should allow direct access to the Fritzbox answering machine but I have not tested it. Protonmail and its app are fully encrypted. For a bit of extra security you can configure the answering machine to delete messages after they are sent to the email address.
Most routers and ISPs have answering machine functions and provide IP phone services with their plans so you do not need to have my specific hardware to set this up, just follow the steps!
