VOIP Any Experts / Can you Port a BT Number to a VOIP Service ?

[pmcgsmurf]

Hi

We have an existing BT line about to be cancelled and may like to keep the geographic number.

Only option BT can offer is a VOIP line for £13 month "but" we need to have a business broadband line but all services are being cancelled (building being vacated).
A possible option may be to install a BT broadband line at another address but seems like an unnecessary expense.

Anyone know of any VOIP providers that could port the number over to them so that we could use an App. or set a message service on it?

 

[markjay]

We use Orbtalk who do this sort of thing BUT we are a business so you'll need to find out if they can do this for residential lines as well (and at what cost).

 

[219]

Maybe unrelated , but my sister was able to take her existing number over to Sky , but only later discovered that if she leaves them
she won’t be able to transfer it anywhere else .

 

[pmcgsmurf]

It seems that Ringcentral can port the telephone number over and give us a VOIP service for £9.60 per user/month for minimum 2 users.
Account setup, porting started but will take a few weeks to get the BT number over, total cost for the next year is £230 for both users.

BT have just hit us with over £500 of "Early Termination Charges".

Needless to say I told BT sales where to go to for the future business and possibility of using them for VOIP.

 

[rockits]

Yup, you can certainly port the number. We do it all the time.

IMPORTANT BIT - You need to port it before you cancel it and it will cancel as a consequence of the port. If you cancel before porting you will lose it forever.

Therefore stop the cancel! Quick!!

Drop me a PM if you want some help. We can port it and provide SIP trunks, numbers, calls whatever you need. Or if you have a provider happy to help. I've been doing this a while now so can steer you in the right direction through the myriad of sometimes complex options.

We often place a forward on the old number line to a new SIP trunk/number and port it to the same SIP trunk so no loss of service to that number at all.

 

[pmcgsmurf]

Thanks Rockits

We've only cancelled the Fibre, fax and alarm lines at the moment, have left the voice line for the moment as we were told this must be active to port.
Ringcentral have already applied to BT to port the line over to them after we did all the paperwork on Friday and as you said have said the line will cancel when the port is done.

A bit of a minefield but an hour doing some searches came up with Ringcentral and then a little on the phone to them had everything in place at a reasonable cost.

Quite why BT come up with the situation where you don't need "any" hardware for a VOIP line but "must" have a BT broadband line makes no sense, their loss.

 

[rockits]

Ok, no worries. Glass you got it sorted.

BT are a funny old dinosaur. We deal with them only as a last resort!

The only exception to porting easily is if the leaving provider wants to make it difficult or charge ridiculous and unreasonable port away or exit charges.

We can do lots of things now with numbers once they are 'virtualised' away from fixed lines they were conventionally attached to. Allows forwarding, time profiles to do different things and routing at different times, voicemail virtual receptionist.....the list is endless. As a rule you can often be as creative and flexible as you need.

We charge from £4.99 per month for a SIP channels or hosted phone system extensions. With and without call packages so you don't have to spend a fortune anymore to have a.good little phone system. We do a lot of 3CX software on-premise and hosted phone systems which are very good with voice , video and web conferencing amongst many other features. They even do a fee version which is plenty good enough for most small businesses.

I know many people who made tons of cash years ago in the telecoms world when people paid fortunes for system, maintenance and calls. We migrated one a few years back when they went from paying BT about 1.5k per month to less than 500 quid. Big savings for a better system than they had. There are still tons paying way too much because of fear of change. It can be easy and seem less to changeover if planned correctly though.

The biggest thing to keep on top of on the SIP side is fraud. It can run up huge bills if not protected. We have a standard call fraud protection set as max daily spend limit that when it hits a certain point sends alerts the if it hits 100% bars all outgoing calls until unlocked again.

We had a new customer we took on years back on Talk Talk Business ISDN that migrated away from TTB to us just after they had a massive fraud hack that run up a bill of 4.5k over a weekend. TTB had NO call fraud protection on their entire ISDN network....bonkers! Under our system their maximum expose would have been the preset limit of maybe 30 quid. TTB refused to pay the bill and the customer had to pay it!

 

[pmcgsmurf]

Thanks

I'll check our call system as we'd have no plan to call out, simply for the odd customer that may call our old line (1988), to be honest though about 99% of the calls we get are folks trying to sell us things.

Our old Meridian Norstar system with voicemail and about 20 odd handsets about to be pulled out, I still know how to program that off the top of my head.

BT are in fact an old dinosaur as you say, on a plus note for me I found by home broadband line was up a couple of weeks ago so time to switch provider again and see what cashback etc. I can get.