Keeping your number

I posted on this over two weeks ago now, and I thought it worth explaining progress.

We are understanding BT better on this every day - yay! I have to thank the "EMP Knowhow" team at BT on this, they are helping a lot.

I am now confident that we can port a number to VoIP without breaking the broadband. Very confident. Sadly BT are enforcing an unnecessary, and incorrect, 14 day lead time on such orders which means, after a couple of false starts, I cannot confirm having done this until later this week.

However, we have managed a lot. We have several test lines which BT are incorrectly ceasing after cancelled number ports, and lots of threats of legal acton and escalations. But definitely progress.

I even managed to work out some of the renumber logic to get back my old house phone number, from 10 years ago, and now am porting out to VoIP! That is just a cool thing to do!!!

We have also had a lot of discussion with the telco we use to handle porting, and interestingly this is new to them. I am not sure people offering VoIP can offer to port a number without killing the broadband, but it looks like we can - yay!

So we are pretty much at the stage for volunteers to try this!

There are two types I am after.

1. People with PSTN with us (and broadband) wanting to resurrect their old PSTN number and have it on VoIP.

2. More likely, people with broadband with us, but PSTN via someone like BT, that are interested in us taking over the phone line part and porting the number to VoIP in the process.

Email trials@ our usual domain, and we can discuss. We'll not charge normal porting fees to do this, but VoIP is £1/month+VAT and call charges as normal. There is a danger of things going wrong, but we'll cover any reconnect costs and try to ensure the number is not lost. I'll throw in a free dragon :-)

More and more I feel dealing with BT is like learning magic (XML) spells.

P.S. We have several volunteers waiting now, thank you - the first test port done like this had a completion date of 2016-04-22T23:59:59 and as of 23:33:00 last night it is Warning 572 KCI-3 (Order Completed) Delayed In Processing. We'll see how that goes before we put anyone's real order in.

P.P.S BT have cancelled the orders we have submitted - and to be frank I an getting fed up with threatening to sue telcos already today. We're trying to get to the bottom of it, but could mean another 2 week wait.