Just a phew PhoneGnome tips to pass along:

What if your Internet goes down?

Okay, like my Internet never goes down except that it DID right at the exact moment I went to make a phone call. My PhoneGnome (actually the phone connected to PhoneGnome) wasn’t giving me any dial tone. According to David Bekenmeyer, top gnome over at TelEvolution, PhoneGnome takes a few minutes to detect that Internet has disappeared. DO NOT panic. Wait a few minutes and your PhoneGnome will switch over to PSTN mode and give you dial tone.

But what’s with the Phunky Dial Tone?

If your Internet goes down and your PhoneGnome switches to PSTN mode, you’ll hear a phunky sounding dial tone, higher pitched than normal. It’s not a malfunction. You can make regular landline calls just fine. The PhoneGnome folks thought that a distinct dial tone would be helpful in alerting you to the fact that Internet calling is temporarily unavailable. If you find this feature alarming rather than reassuring, let them know. The TelEvolution support gnomes are very receptive to feedback so your ideas are welcome.

Why is there a ring delay between my PhoneGnome and the other phones in the house?

This I noticed right away. When I receive an incoming call, the upstairs phone rings twice before the PhoneGnome starts ringing. It was bizarre to hear the ringing out of sync. Almost sounded like two separate calls coming in. What’s happening is the PhoneGnome needs a bit of time to collect caller ID and other information before passing the call through. The best way to solve this is to put all your phones in the house on PhoneGnome. For $19.95, you can buy a Whole House Wiring kit that uses the Line 2 wiring to distribute PhoneGnome features to all your phones in the house. If messing with wiring isn’t your thing, an easier and inexpensive option is to buy a cordless telephone with multiple handsets.  Connect the cordless phone base station to PhoneGnome, and deploy the extra handsets around the house.