(FORTUNE Magazine) – If you can't wait for the wireless revolution, a new service from AT&T will get you partway there: You can now drop in on friends and turn their phone into your own personal extension. Unlike call forwarding, which must be set up in advance from home, you can arrange this connection from any Touchtone phone anytime. For $7 a month, subscribers to Easy Reach 700 get a personal phone number with a 700 area code and access to a system that can direct their calls anywhere in the lower 48 states. The service started June 15. Here's how it works: Say a subscriber who lives in Chicago is visiting a friend in Milwaukee. When she arrives, she dials 0-700, then her seven-digit personal phone number, and finally a private five-digit identification code. An electronic voice asks her where she wants to get her calls; she punches in her friend's home number. She can specify that calls be forwarded only during certain hours, or restrict calls to people who have her ID number. (Rejected callers hear a recording that their party is unavailable.) She can also give her kids a separate code that lets them charge their calls to her. Otherwise, callers pay a flat rate of 25 cents a minute during weekdays, 15 cents a minute at other times. Without a flat rate, they would have no idea how much a call would cost, since they won't know in advance how far their calls will be traveling. (With regular call forwarding, the bill is split; the caller covers the first leg, then the subscriber pays to send the call from his or her home phone to its destination.) When no forwarding instructions are in place, all calls go to her home phone. If she moves to a different city, her personal number stays the same. The 700 plan is just a small step toward universal service. The system knows where you are only if you tell it. Activating it from a cellular phone can be complicated or, in some areas, impossible. Larry Gitten, head of wireless services architecture at Bell Labs, says, ''It can't follow me when I'm running around town.'' But it may return to AT&T a tiny slice of an old market -- local phone service, a business the company is ordinarily barred from. The 25-cents-a- minute charge will discourage use of 700 numbers for local traffic, but sometimes a dialer won't know a subscriber's location. Even if it turns out to be around the corner, the call will go through. If the Baby Bells have a problem with that, too bad. The time for filing objections with the FCC has already passed.