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Cable VoIP silliness

Started by cnowalk, March 02, 2022, 07:52:27 PM

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cnowalk

On the off chance anyone is interested, I figured I'd share this adventure.

When I first started my phone collecting journey in the summer of 2020, I was perfectly happy using Google Voice. I already had an OBI 200 on hand, so it just made sense, plus GV is free.

Fast forward to this past fall, and I had a real hankerin' to have paid home phone service.  Normal people would think this is goofy, but I figure some on this forum would appreciate it. Although you may still think it's goofy. That's cool.

I had originally wanted to go with AT&T, but with the discontinuation of POTS I would have to order AT&T Digital Voice which requires AT&T internet. The only AT&T internet available at my address is 30x slower what I currently have from everyone's favorite US internet provider (Comcast). Since the pricing and speed were terrible, I elected to take a much cheaper route, VoIP.ms.

I was happy with VoIP.ms for about a month; it worked fine for my purposes and it's cheap, even after acquiring several DIDs.  But still, I wanted something more real, which made me sign up for Xfinity Voice to go along with my internet plan.  I signed up on New Year's Eve, and had working service sometime the following week. It took some effort, there were issues with activation making it take a few extra days.

I was assigned a new number, I wanted to try it out for a bit before porting in one of my VoIP numbers. After a couple of weeks, I decided I was happy and initiated a port. It was super easy, one week later and I had the VoIP number working on my Xfinity line.

Among my collection of old phones, there is no caller ID or answering machine, so I figured I would depend on the online portal for call history and visual voicemail. I receive few unwanted calls, so I'm fine with none of the phones having a display.  When the port first completed, both the temporary number and ported number were available on my account, and I could choose between the two.

About two weeks ago, the ported number dropped off my account, but there was no disruption of service. I was no longer able to see my call history and voicemail, so I started a ticket with Comcast support through one of their social media teams. We've been going back and forth on it for the past two weeks, and they are finally clear on the issue and know what needs to be fixed. However, their advanced repair team still has not gotten it done.

I have been very patient with them, but it's wearing thin. I'm even considering a port back out if this goes on much longer.