Virtual (re-routable) phone numbers

[Catherine]

I'm in the UK and want someone in the US to phone me. However I don't
want to give out my phone number.

Are there any providers of virtual numbers which would pass on a call from
a US caller?

Ideally this would ring my mobile but if not then it could ring my
landline.

I have some very old Flextel numbers from about 10 years ago. Would they
work for this purpose or should I use a different provider of virtual
numbers?

Thank you for any help.

[Rob Morley]

If you can arrange the time of the call (assuming you don't have a dual
SIM phone) you could just use a PAYG SIM from someone like giffgaff.

[Woody]

"Catherine" <inv...@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:XnsA465CC8...@8.17.249.100...

You can have a 070 personal number, or use a VOIP line and get an 0845
or 0870 number.


--
Woody

harrogate3 at ntlworld dot com

[Graham.]

On Sun, 22 Mar 2015 20:06:26 GMT, Catherine <inv...@nospam.com>
wrote:

I have done precisely that for my son-in-law.
The American callers dial a US geographic number so at worst it's
very cheap or quite likley inclusive in their calling plan.

It uses two services, www.callcentric.com for the US number, and
www.discountvoip.co.uk which is the cheapest provider I know of for
calling a UK mobile; less than 1p/min

Grab a callcentric account, and assign a US number (You can actually
have two free numbers on an account)

Now grab an account from www.discountvoip.co.uk and apply some credit.
Go to settings, and enable SIP server access.

For some reason you can't set up the call forward in the web
interface, you have to download the softphone, log in, and go to call
settings - forward calls. select "always" and enter your mobile or
landline number in +44 format.

Now go back to the callcentric account
Go to Preferences - call forwarding and forward all calls to your
discountvoip account which you will set up next.
It will be in the form of a uri and will look like this
your_acc...@sip.discountvoip.co.uk

It's so cheap, my SiL is happy for all his US clients to call him this
way, and it creates the illusion of a US presence.


--

Graham.

%Profound_observation%

[Graham.]

Just to follow that up.
It occurs to me that you might have reasons for giving these callers a
UK number.
If so, forget callcentric, and use ukddi.com
Create an account and allocate a number, Most if not all UK STD codes
are available.
Then click on "list" and the green arrow next to your number.
In the "route" field enter the same URI, except this time it has to
start with "sip:"

like this:
sip:your_discount...@sip.discountvoip.co.uk

That's all you need to do, dial the number and your phone should ring





--

Graham.

%Profound_observation%

[Andrew Gabriel]

In article <menksn$9dj$1...@dont-email.me>,

You can't always dial numbers like 070, 0845, 0870 from foreign
carriers, as they often can't be bothered to work out how much
they need to charge for special rate calls, and just block them.

An 01/02/03 VoIP number should work OK.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

[Jeremy at Comparific]

Flextel numbers still work, and can be routed to other numbers and to VoIP accounts easily. Costs of re-routing vary (from free) according to the number range.

Sipgate is another good option to get hold of a regular phone number that you can pick up via a VoIP client on your PC or smartphone, or forward. If you're lucky, your router may support VoIP, in which case you can configure it and then just plug a phone in and use it as normal.

[Woody]

"Jeremy at Comparific" <jeremy....@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:faddb6cc-069e-45a7...@googlegroups.com...

If not just get an analogue adapter such as the Linksys PAPT2 which,
although now obsolete, can be bought on fleabay for remarkably few
pennies - as for that matter can a SIP phone.

[DrTeeth]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2015 02:18:46 +0000, just as I was about to take a
herb, Graham. <m...@privicy.net> disturbed my reverie and wrote:

>It's so cheap, my SiL is happy for all his US clients to call him this
>way, and it creates the illusion of a US presence.

Don't they twig that he is schloffing when he should be awake due to
the time differences?
--
Cheers,

DrT

** You've never known happiness until you're married;
** but by then it is too late.

[Graham.]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2015 18:23:52 +0000, DrTeeth <no-e...@tardis.com>
wrote:

>On Mon, 23 Mar 2015 02:18:46 +0000, just as I was about to take a
>herb, Graham. <m...@privicy.net> disturbed my reverie and wrote:
>
>>It's so cheap, my SiL is happy for all his US clients to call him this
>>way, and it creates the illusion of a US presence.
>
>Don't they twig that he is schloffing when he should be awake due to
>the time differences?

As long as they're dollar signs in the number I don't think he cares
what time they call.

Actually callcentric numbers expire after 90 days of non use, so there
is considerable churn of the number pool, and consequent wrong
numbers.

--

Graham.

%Profound_observation%

[Graham.]

Given that geographic numbers are easily obtained I can't see the
point of an NGN for this situation.

070 personal numbers? Aren't they expensive to call?

They never really took off in the UK, I think the origanal idea was to
issue them corrisponding to words dialled on the keypad, but that
concept was never adopted by our culture, unlike the states.



--

Graham.

%Profound_observation%

[Andrew Gabriel]

In article <78r0ha9cf55jinmci...@4ax.com>,

Graham. <m...@privicy.net> writes:
>
> 070 personal numbers? Aren't they expensive to call?

Yes.
They were often blocked in company switchboards because of
fraudulent use, and then became rather useless. They were
available as a revenue share initially (or for free and the
terminating telco took all the revenue), but ISTR revenue
share on them was banned later.

Also, they looked too much like mobile numbers, and most
people didn't realise they were much more expensive.

> They never really took off in the UK, I think the origanal idea was to
> issue them corrisponding to words dialled on the keypad, but that
> concept was never adopted by our culture, unlike the states.

--

[Peter Andrews]

That caused a lot of problems, in the late nineties, with some 0800
numbers that some salesmen sold on the basis of using a word instead of
the number, not a problem till they added a couple of extra characters
to the end of the number to make it more saleable. Unfortunately it
also made it unroutable on some networks! I had some interesting
meetings with Oftel over that.

Peter

[Roland Perry]

In message <55114127...@invalid.com>, at 10:49:11 on Tue, 24 Mar
2015, Peter Andrews <p...@invalid.com> remarked:

>> They never really took off in the UK, I think the origanal idea was to
>> issue them corrisponding to words dialled on the keypad, but that
>> concept was never adopted by our culture, unlike the states.
>>
>That caused a lot of problems, in the late nineties, with some 0800
>numbers that some salesmen sold on the basis of using a word instead of
>the number, not a problem till they added a couple of extra characters
>to the end of the number to make it more saleable. Unfortunately it
>also made it unroutable on some networks! I had some interesting
>meetings with Oftel over that.

That's called over-dialling, and I thought the networks were supposed to
be able to cope with that - one of the NICC standards presumably.
--
Roland Perry

[J B]

I use localphone http://www.localphone.com/ which gives me as many
numbers from my own uk local exchange to divert to whatever/wherever I
wish, but it is chargeable.

--
J B

[notya...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, 22 March 2015 20:06:24 UTC, Catherine wrote:

You can get a virtual phone number from Voipfone for free (probably others).

They are of the form 0560 xxxxxx.

You can also buy or rent 01 or 02 geographic numbers (we got one this month) almost anywhere in the country or 03 UK wide ones. You could even have a US number. Other suppliers will provide 0800, 0845 and similar codes.

[notya...@gmail.com]

We had the reverse problem with a Danish Telco who gave themselves a local switchboard number of 1111. Dialled from the UK the calls would not route as the dialled number was short and treated as incomplete (especially by C&W).

[notya...@gmail.com]

Or use your mobile - high end Nokia have VOIP built in and there are free app's for Android.

[Catherine]

That seems complicated as I only expect to have a few incoming calls.
However it's nice to know suc a neat set can be arranged.

[Catherine]

Actually my need is for a non-UK number to call from the States but I was
assuming I had to have a UK prefix. Some of the other suggestions are
inteesting but all require fiddly setup or subscription - like SykpeIP.

[Catherine]

Are the geographic numbers you mention free?

[Michael Chare]

If you can use voip why not just subscribe to a US voip provider. You
might well be able to find one that would not charge if you just have
incoming calls.


--
Michael Chare

[Graham.]

On Tue, 24 Mar 2015 20:11:24 GMT, Catherine <inv...@nospam.com>
wrote:

Yes, the US numbers from callcentric.com and the UK numbers from
ukddi.com are totally free.

The system described in my other post was a little complex, but for
your purposes you could just use a Callcentric account for the US
number and the forward to your mobile.

They charge 2.75 cents/min to most UK mobile networks which isn't too
bad.

Also, the minimum credit is only $5, CC or Paypal.

I recommend you get an account and set up the numbers and the call
forwarding, you can add the credit later when you are confident about
it.





--

Graham.

%Profound_observation%

[Lobster]

On 23 Mar 2015, Graham. <m...@privicy.net> grunted:

I agree - I also have an old flextel number like the OP, and remember
having severe, inconsistent problems receiving call son it from
overseas.

>>An 01/02/03 VoIP number should work OK.
>
> Given that geographic numbers are easily obtained I can't see the
> point of an NGN for this situation.
>
> 070 personal numbers? Aren't they expensive to call?
>
> They never really took off in the UK, I think the origanal idea was to
> issue them corrisponding to words dialled on the keypad, but that
> concept was never adopted by our culture, unlike the states.

When personal numbers first started up they were very useful actually -
this was before the days of bundled minutes with mobile phones; and the
cost of dialling an flextel/070 number was only marginally more than
dialling a mobile. Main selling point for me though was that this was
also before the days of PAC codes, so if you wanted to change airtime
providers (eg to get a new cashback deal) that meant a new phone
number... using a flextel number got round that.

I dumped my flextel number not long after Orange arrived with all-
inclusive packages - a friend Orange hit the roof when he got the bill
for calling it!

--
David

[Chris Blunt]

On Fri, 27 Mar 2015 23:52:56 GMT, Lobster
<davidlobs...@hotmail.com> wrote:

>When personal numbers first started up they were very useful actually -
>this was before the days of bundled minutes with mobile phones; and the
>cost of dialling an flextel/070 number was only marginally more than
>dialling a mobile. Main selling point for me though was that this was
>also before the days of PAC codes, so if you wanted to change airtime
>providers (eg to get a new cashback deal) that meant a new phone
>number... using a flextel number got round that.

I used to have a Flextel 070 number which I diverted to a mobile. The
problem was people would send text messages to it thinking it was a
real mobile number and they didn't get delivered.

Chris

[Lobster]

On 29 Mar 2015, Chris Blunt <ma...@nospam.com> grunted:

Ah yes, I remember that too! I used my Flextel numnber exclusively for my
mobile; though IIRC back then in the early days, text messaging really
hadn't taken off and it wasn't an issue. Certainly can't imagine ever
using it for a a mobile nowadays, anyway!


--
David

[Graham.]

My first mobile phone could only store 15 SMS messages and the
functionality was buried deep in the menus so it was far from
convenient to use.
It was a company phone and we used SMS to pass field service call
details.

I knew quite a few people with GSM mobiles, but none of them were
aware of SMS, so my party trick was to send them their first message
and a conversation would ensue about what earthly use could these
"texts" be put to.




--

Graham.

%Profound_observation%

[DrTeeth]

Best wishes for the next few days.
73

[Chris Blunt]

On Tue, 31 Mar 2015 07:36:22 GMT, Lobster
<davidlobs...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Actually, I'm not sure if there's any technical reason why an SMS
should not be passed if it's addressed to a Flextel/070 number. After
all, you can send texts to landline numbers now. Similarly, if you
call-forward one mobile to another mobile voice calls get forwarded
but SMS messages don't. I'm not sure why that is.

Chris

[David Woolley]

On 04/04/15 06:36, Chris Blunt wrote:
> After
> all, you can send texts to landline numbers now

Texts to landline numbers are handled by a kludge and they don't go
through the local exchange in a normal way. I suspect that the text
would have to be forwarded, using mobile network protocols, to the real
network for the destination phone. That might require additional
infrastructure for the flexible number provider.

[notya...@gmail.com]

Indeed. SMS to my ex BT number on Voipfone (ported after BT "dropped" it migrating from HH to ADSL) are intercepted by BT, converted to a voicemail message and then BT calls the number and plays the message.

[Pete Forman]

Converting to voice is the default. You need to enable SMS delivery with
BT or whoever your landline provider is. Obviously you need a phone set
that does SMS. I set mine up some years ago.
--
Pete Forman
http://petef.22web.org/payg.html

[Chris Blunt]

You could be right. If Flextel had been able to forward SMS messages
to my mobile I would have continued using them. That's the main reason
I stopped using the service.

Chris

[notya...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, 4 April 2015 12:48:29 UTC+1, Pete Forman wrote:
> notya...@gmail.com writes:
>
> > On Saturday, 4 April 2015 10:23:58 UTC+1, David Woolley wrote:
> >> On 04/04/15 06:36, Chris Blunt wrote:
> >> > After
> >> > all, you can send texts to landline numbers now
> >>
> >> Texts to landline numbers are handled by a kludge and they don't go
> >> through the local exchange in a normal way. I suspect that the text
> >> would have to be forwarded, using mobile network protocols, to the
> >> real network for the destination phone. That might require additional
> >> infrastructure for the flexible number provider.
> >
> > Indeed. SMS to my ex BT number on Voipfone (ported after BT "dropped"
> > it migrating from HH to ADSL) are intercepted by BT, converted to a
> > voicemail message and then BT calls the number and plays the message.
>
> Converting to voice is the default. You need to enable SMS delivery with
> BT or whoever your landline provider is.

Landline provider? The number is on Voipfone. As the number was originally in BT's range it goes to them first and it is BT who convert it to voicemail and then ring the number. Not sure how one would get BT to do anything about this as they are not getting paid at all (AFAIK).

> Obviously you need a phone set
> that does SMS. I set mine up some years ago.

It does, but it is not sent the SMS.