Ross C wrote: > Thanks, but I'm looking for information on porting numbers when the current > provider holding the numbers goes out of business and is unreachable. Can I > get the numbers? The business has had the same phone number for almost 30 > years and definitely can't lose the number due to some provider's > instability. > As most VoIP companies are relatively new and small, I'm a bit skittish > about porting these numbers to an ITSN, then that company going out of > business and not being able to get my numbers back. How would that work?
So use call forwarding from the Telco, forward it to a VoIP DID, if you lose the VoIP DID, change the forwarding to another number. That way you can also keep the PSTN line for emergency calls (despite 911 services being offered by various ITSPs, you are relying on the Internet on site being in top shape). For example, I have seen more companies do something strange (or even participate unknowingly in DDOS attacks) rendering their internet connection useless. While there are workarounds (maintain a good security policy, use QOS, dual networks with router-based traffic control), it never pays to have a customer unhappy (or dead in the case of a missed 911 call). Typically most ITSPs rely on SLAs (Service Level Agreements) from upstream providers which will effectively indemnify them in case of upstream failure, a court case is not really useful in the prevention of the situation. Is one POTS line really so much in the end? We normally route outbound calls first via ourselves, and in the case of network failures, fall back to the customer's PSTN/BRI line. (BRI being quite popular here in Italy). This way they have unlimited outgoing lines and a set number of incoming lines (we typically offer per channel on inbound DIDs). If there is ever any problem with the DID, you can forward the PSTN number back to a cellphone etc. In fact, if I remember correctly NuFone (https://www.nufone.net/) in the USA provides a service whereby they will try to route your number via voip and fallback to an alternate number (ideal if available). Furthermore, NuFone is one of the oldest (if not _the_ oldest) IAX provider and has proven to be one of our most stable providers. If you know what you're doing, NuFone would be my recommendation, if however you need quite a bit of hand holding, I'd either recommend another provider, or exhaustive use of the various Asterisk documentation resources. :) You can never guarantee a company is not going to go under, but when a company provides a good service for an extended period of time, you can feel a little safer. -- Cheers, Matt Riddell _______________________________________________ http://www.sineapps.com/news.php (Daily Asterisk News - html) http://freevoip.gedameurope.com (Free Asterisk Voip Community) http://www.sineapps.com/rssfeed.php (Daily Asterisk News - rss) _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
