By 2025, Openreach hope to have moved entirely away from copper voice line services, including ISDN. The alternative to this is an entirely IP based voice service that we provide.
To get started, you'll need to sign up for the service which you can do via our
website. For single-line use, you would only need one extension (phone) and one number to calculate the base monthly cost. Your welcome email will contain all information you need to get started.
From this, you'd need to consider if you want to use a soft-phone (software running on a computer or mobile device), a hardware phone (a physical phone that connects to your broadband router) or a converter that you can plug your old analogue phone in to (and then into your broadband router).
Each have their own benefits. A softphone can be taken with you on a mobile device so you can use it anywhere in the world but when used away from wifi, will be reliant on a good signal. A hardware phone often provides the most reliable and clear connection due to being entirely digital, also the hardware often provides the best functionality with digital displays to show call information as well as being able to make and receive many calls at once. Finally, an adapter is often the easiest to transition to from a landline as the majority of equipment will work with very few changes (except modems, alarms and similar devices which won't work).
We recommend the following for use with the service:
Softphone: Bria (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)
Hardware: Snom desk phones and Gigaset for a cordless DECT setup
Adapters: Cisco SPA
In all cases, a reliable and stable connection with a relatively low jitter is recommended. The higher the jitter, the more the voice quality of calls will suffer.
As our service is easy-on and easy-off, we suggest that an account is setup and tested using a softphone to ensure that it works for you. After which porting of existing numbers and buying hardware would be the next steps.
We can port numbers from
most providers, including all that use Openreach's network (meaning any fixed-line provider reliant on the BT/Openreach network, such as Sky and Talk Talk) but also any other fixed-line network such as Virgin Media or Kcom. In addition, we can port number from single lines to multi-lines and ISDN2, ISDN30 and upwards.
For lines that have any additional services such as broadband, this will cease when you port the number away. In such cases where you would like the broadband to remain but the number to port to VoIP, you'll need to ask your line provider to process a "re-number with number export" which will allow this to happen. There will likely be a charge for this.
A porting charge of £15 applies per port request and this includes both completed ports and those that are rejected.
Porting a number can take as little as a week and once the porting is complete, it will start working on our service immediately. You will be able to make outgoing calls from the number before the porting is complete but can only receive calls to the number with us once complete.
This would then give you a working service with a number that you can keep as long as you want, even if moving to another part of the country, or another country entirely. Unlike fixed landlines, you're no longer restricted on number portability.
If you have any further questions regarding the move from fixed-line telephone, please do get in touch.
