I was asked for a recommendation for how to setup a help line that can forward to various other phones on a schedule without using Google Voice and with minimal tech skills. I know about Twilio. Any suggestions that would not require as much tech skills and/or ideally be a coop or more values aligned the Twilio?
@jamiem
I do this with a DID provider, a VOIP call termination provider and my own kamailio server. This is probably not 'minimal', but then we have to define minimal. Kamailio for such a service runs without much computing resources and there is no need to pass any media so the bandwidth use for SIP is tiny.
There does seem to be an idea that one needs "wizard foo" to hack on such things, (SIP, et al.) but it is really not much more complex than a simple web server.
@jamiem
didww.com have been good to us, and even though I have not used it (no need), I understand they also have a fairly powerful web based switch control panel.
They only thing I have an issue with is Caller ID forwarding, this is because regulation and the industry has severely tightened restrictions on this in recent years. One used to be able to originate calls with any CID one cared to put in the headers.
@jamiem
With one's own solution, one is not limited to just forwarding to another phone number, although for sure this may be "easiest".
For example, Android (AOSP) actually had native SIP support integrated in stock dialer before android 12 although some manufacturers hid it, and yes there may be battery drain issues and other issue for reliability. But it was there, and worked!
Core support is still there of course, VoLTE and WoWifi is just glorified SIP.