Number porting – things to think about

Number Porting – when you change your telephone provider you may find that you use your phone lines for more than making phone calls. If you are moving away from traditional telephony to VoIP it is even more important to know exactly what your telephone lines do.

So here is our guide to things you MUST consider before you submit numbers for porting

Once you port a number away from your current provider, the line associated with that number will stop working and any services you currently use that line for will also stop working.

So consider the following and call us to discuss if you are in any way uncertain – it may be critical to your business processes continuing to run correctly.

Broadband

• Does it come in on any of the numbers you want to port? If it does and you port the number without making other arrangements your internet connection will be terminated.
• You can talk to your provider and add an internet connection to a line you want to keep – eg a Redcare line
• You can talk to your current provider and explain that you want to port your number but want to keep your connection. They should give you a new number for that line at the point of number porting
• You may have access to “Fibre to the Premises” in which case you wont need a traditional phone line to get your internet connection.
• We are happy to recommend Zen as an internet provider

ISDN and DDIs

• Are there other number(s) associated with the number you are trying to port – e.g. DDI / ISDN. It is important for the port to go smoothly that you submit the correct information of these forms.

Alarm System

• If you have an alarm system such as Redcare, most alarms providers insist that you have a dedicated analogue line.

Credit Card machine

• Do you use a phone line for credit card transactions? You will either need to keep a line for that or move to an internet-based card machine.

Fax

• Are you porting any fax lines? We can provide a converter that will allow you to keep using your current fax machine or you may want to use our built-in fax-to-email receive facility and an outbound email-to-fax service such as eFax.

Door Entry System

• Have you got a door release system through your telephone system?
• You can either add change to a simple IP intercom system that start at around £200
• You can purchase an adaptor for your current system at around £50

If you are moving away from ISDN or analogue phone lines to hosted VoIP you do need an internet connection so when porting numbers into our service, above is something to think about.

Number porting is an easy and painless process but it is is also easy to get it wrong so please consider the above and let’s chat through any questions before we start the process.