What can I do about a land line if I move to B4RN?

One of the questions that's been coming up for our volunteers is that people want to know if they can keep their landline telephone number and what that might look like with B4RN.

The simple answer is, yes you can keep your existing telephone number. It's a little bit like the process of moving mobile network and keeping your number - there is a sequence of steps to follow and they require a number on an active account.

Vonage

There are lots of service providers out there that can take over your number and to make sure you can connect to the UK landline network. The B4RN volunteers have recently opted to recommend Vonage, because they have good customer support and a great range of options for call packages, plus the built-in services that you might want like "call waiting" are part of the standard package. B4RN customers have been very happy with the ease of installation.

Pricing for the Vonage service mostly varies depending on whom you would need to call, exactly the same as most other phone providers. So if you call mobiles a lot, there's a package you can opt for that builds the cost of calls into the monthly fee.

You can have a look at the call package options for Vonage here: https://www.vonageforhome.co.uk/home/call-plans/

Sipgate

For anyone who rarely uses their landline but just wants the ability to keep their number for incoming calls, other groups have been very happy with the Sipgate option - for which you pay an upfront fee, but then you don't pay monthly charges, and you only pay to make outbound calls if you need to.

The resources page https://b4rn.org.uk/resources/ on the B4RN website has a number of helpful documents for you to download if you'd like a bit more detail on how all the tech works, and here is the "B4RN router telephone guide for Sipgate".

Once we get nearer to connecting you up to B4RN, we can help advise you on how to get things up and running.

The key thing is that whichever service you decide to use, you MUST keep your landline active until your phone number is ported to the new service provider, because they can only work with an active phone number.