Hi All, seems one of the 4 ISP's installing FTTP in Clacton on sea are now accepting "pre orders" for my road.
The sales guy said it would be a few weeks, but I know he's just selling a product to earn his commission.
Is pre ordering a clearer sign it's going live soon?
It's a pretty good sign, but there are no guarantees until it goes live of course. Is this an altnet? They could be pulling fibres through Openreach's ducts.
I'm lost with the VOIP and porting my number over and what to pay for, if we decided to keep the number of course.
This is something you can start preparing for now.
1. Get yourself an account with a SIP VOIP provider. It will come with a new phone number (in an area code of your choice!) I suggest sipgate.co.uk "Basic" as it has zero monthly fees, and reasonable PAYG charges if you use it for outgoing calls, but there are other options: I see mentions on this forum of yay.com, voipfone.co.uk, and aa.net.uk.
2. Set up your client device(s). Lots of choice here. If you have a smartphone, then for £6 you can get Acrobits Softphone which is extremely good (*) - and if you have set up family app sharing you only need to pay for it once. You could also look into buying an ATA that you plug your existing phone(s) into; or a DECT VOIP base station for cordless phones, like Gigaset N300A IP; or an ethernet (corded) or wifi SIP phone; or a PC-based SIP client; or any combination of these. Plug into your existing network, and configure it to work with your chosen SIP provider. Test you can make and receive calls.
3. Once you get your new FTTP connection, move it all over to the FTTP router and check you're still happy it's all working.
4. Then issue an instruction to your SIP provider to port in your existing number. This will have a charge, typically £30-£45, and I think it takes a week or two. When the number port takes place,
the existing phone line and any broadband on it will be terminated!
So it's important that you don't do step 4 until you have your new FTTP service, and you're within say a month of your end-contract date to avoid early termination charges. It's also important that you *don't* tell your existing ISP that you want to cease the line, otherwise they will cease it themselves and you won't be able to port the number.
Hope this makes sense!
(*) Because Acrobits uses native Push Notifications, it doesn't drain your battery while waiting for incoming calls. But there are lots of other SIP clients out there for free, e.g. Zoiper, if you just want to play with this without spending money.
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highlander317
