Migrating home phone to VOIP

Thinking of moving my home phone to VOIP before I move house (which is on another exchange) to keep phone number...

How is being on VOIP working out for people here? I was looking at the Gigaset DECT handsets

Any recommendations of providers or hardware gratefully received!

I ported my main number to Voipfone about two years ago, at the time, porting to Sipgate was not possible.

On the whole it works, though sometimes calls to mobile phones don't work very well.

I like the Voicemail facilities from Voipfone and Sipgate. I get warning text messages, and emails with the phone message as an attachment.

With my previous BT landline, I had DECT phones that could send and receive text messages. Now, when people send text messages to my Voipfone and Sipgate Voip phone numbers I get a voice call from some BT text to voice service.

Edited by Michael_Chare (Sun 12-Nov-17 11:37:36)

I would take a look at SIPGATE if I were you. They support porting and it's a completely free service if you only want incoming calls. SIPGATE works perfectly with Gigaset handsets capable of VoIP, I've had a landline number with them for a fair few years now purely so family can call me for free.

I haven't used it, but they offer a bundle for something like £7 or £8 to get unlimited UK minutes (I think) so it may work out quite well for you.

Go for one of the Gigaset xxxA GO series. There are several variants available - all have the same base but thhe xxx changes depending in the initial handset and have three answer machines.

You can configure it for one PSTN and six VOIP - so your ported number will be fine as will your new PSTN even if you don't intend using it much.

I recently moved my post office landline to VOIP. I initailly tried Sipgate which may be cheap as chips but imho their actual service isn't that great (had a few outages) and support (German based?) is absolute rubbish.

In the end i went with yay.com which is brilliant. It may cost slightly more than sipgate (their cheapest payg service is £2.99 pm) but call quality is as good as my copper landline, no outages and phone support (uk based) is top class. Their web portal is very comprehensive and lets you do a million things online incl receiving voicemails as emails, call routing etc. You can sign up for a free 30 day trial and they give you £20 free credit which never expires. I migrated in my PO number to yay and took 2-3 days.

I'm not using a VOIP handset but instead have bought this adaptor from Amazon and using my standard Panasonic handsets. Gigaset handsets are arguably the best out there so I'm sure you could use any Gigaset VOIP handset...it all depends on your budget as they're not cheap.

Interesting feedback - where did you hear about yay?
Is there somewhere online which has looked at call quality across providers?

I'm not necessarily looking for the cheapest - we don't make a massive amount of landline calls - more the flexibility.

Seeya
James

It was yay whom I bought the adapter through via amazon. They included a leaflet about their voip services so thought I would try them out 30 day free trial. I found them to be a far more professional outfit than sipgate.

What you really need is somewhere to park your existing number and then have calls to it routed to your VOIP interface.

Then you can have a second VOIP connection and provided you can demonstrate you "own" the geo-number they can add that as the CLIP even if the number is not parked with them.

Or, since I am moving in January, I could just mess around with a few providers until then.

Ideally I'd like to transfer my number to the destination voip service before I move - then when I move house as long as my internet connection is up then my phone will be too!

So, try a few and when you are happy, then move it.


I am just moving my business lines to a VOIP provider ** and their costs are fairly low especially for the porting as they charge one fee for several lines whereas others charge a fee, of a similar or slightly higher amount, for each line. The numbers will be there and pick up incoming calls and probably get used for international calls, but most UK calls will be from mobiles.

** BT are stopping their basic VOIP service and their replacement is expensive, and in our case NOT as flexible.