A single number at a singularly high price
 May 22nd, 2001
Advantages:
Good range of services
Disadvantages:
Expensive for callers
Recommendable:
Yes
Detailed rating:
Prices
Messaging services
WAP services
Efficency & reliability of services
Customer & service support
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  pauljm
About me:
I'm back and this time I will be writing some new reviews as well as making some long-overdue update...
Member since:11.07.2000
Reviews:82
Members who trust:43
Review rated by 21 Ciao members on average: very helpful 
This review received a counterstatement by a party concerned
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Personal numbers; who wants them and, if you do, why use YAC? There are quite a few companies now offering personal numbers some free, some chargeable. What makes YAC different? Firstly, what are personal numbers? They are non-geographic numbers allocated to a person or organisation that are used solely for redirection. Non-geographic means that the STD code doesn’t relate to an area (so the fact that a number starts 07092 doesn’t mean the user is in any particular place). All personal numbers start with 07, the same as mobile numbers (which are also non-geographic, because they are mobile).The purpose of personal numbers is to allow a single number to be used to contact a subscriber over a range of service providers and across a period of time. For example, you might want to be contacted on your mobile, home or office number depending on the time of day, or you may wish to keep the same contact number despite moving home (or office) to a different town. The original idea was for these numbers to be a lifetime number that would be associated with an individual. What YAC does is to issue a personal number and offer a range of services associated with handling the calls to that number. The number can be set to either handle voice, fax or both. If you
choose to allow faxes, or dedicate a number to fax use only, the faxes will be received by YAC and passed to you as an email attachment. Voice calls can either be transferred to predefined (real-world) numbers or passed to the voicemail system. Recorded messages can be collected by dialling into YAC or delivered to your email, once again as attachments. Three numbers can be defined for diverting, these are shown as Mobile, Home and Temporary but can actually refer to any number you wish. If the first fails to answer, the call will move on to the next. Bear in mind that if you already have a voicemail diversion set up on any of the numbers, for example on your mobile, unanswered calls will go there, rather than to the YAC voicemail (because to YAC it will seem that the call has been answered). You can choose to have a message before transfer, something along the lines of ‘Your call is being transferred press 1 to leave a message, 2 to send a fax…’, or simply go straight to the diversion. If you have a mobile number set up, YAC can advise you of the receipt of a voicemail by sending a text message.As I said above the call can be diverted to a mobile or landline number. You can also divert to numbers in 22 countries overseas. These include most Western European countries as well as USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and Puerto Rico, for some reason). The accounts can be controlled via the internet, as you would expect, or through your telephone. Options can be set, numbers defined and voicemail collected by using the keypad of your phone. This can be very useful when you are away and out of touch.YAC services are free to the subscriber (that is, the person with the number). YAC make their money by charging callers a higher rate for connections. The calls are at BT’s rate ‘J’, which means, currently, 32p per minute peak, 22p evenings and 10.5p weekends. A proportion of these rates goes to YAC to fund their activities. Remember that the cost is the same, irrespective of where the calls actually go (mobile, fixed line or overseas). If you want to collect your voicemail by dialling into YAC this is an 0870 number and is charged at national rates, so 10p or less per minute. Having outlined the service the question remains as to who would want to use the services and for what purpose. I use YAC for three purposes. Firstly to receive faxes, who wants to have a fax machine at home for the one occasion per year that you need it. Simply give the YAC number, make sure that faxes are enabled and ‘voila!’ the fax appears in your email inbox. Secondly to control access to my real numbers. Many competitions, for example, require that you give a contact number, but I don’t particularly want to give either my home number or my (business) mobile. Give them a YAC number and you can set it to divert to your real number or go to voicemail and collect it later. Thirdly I use a YAC number in my business to enable customers to contact the duty receptionist – the calls divert either to the office line or the relevant mobile number.I wouldn’t advise that you use the number as a contact point for your friends, at up to 32p per minute you are likely to find that you don’t have many left! If you are receiving a lot of faxes you might be better to look at eFax.com. They can allocate you an 0870 number (which charges at national rate, hence about 10p per minute or less), however the faxes are sent in a proprietary format so you need to use their reader program. This doesn’t matter at home, but is a problem if you want to collect your faxes from an internet café, for example. Overall YAC offer a useful service if you take account of the charges to your callers. I’ve not found any other company giving a wider range of services and have found no problems in using any of the features. Faxes and voicemails are received pretty much instantly in your email. The quality of the fax reception is excellent (better than my office fax, anyway) and the voicemails are perfectly clear and audible as attachments, although I usually choose to collect them by dialling into YAC.If you are still interested, check out the web site www.yac.com
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20.09.2001 16:28
I've had a YAC number for quite some time which I use as a general contact number for my home-based business. It's ideal for that purpose but, as your op and the earlier comment pointed out, it's no good for people who regularly call me. Nicely written op though - very informative - I even learned some new stuff ;-)
31.05.2001 22:21
I got a yac number when I went to uni so that I didn't have to give my real number out to strangers, but I found it to be too expensive and now that I know them better I gave them my real number anyway, so I don't use it anymore, I did get a free T-shirt out of them though for signing up 5 friends, so it wasn't all bad :)