Number Porting – What You Need to Know
With traditional telecom providers, when your business moves premises to another location you cannot take your telephone number with you. This is a major headache if your customers and suppliers may have known your number for years.
S&S Communications can solve this problem for you through a process known as number porting. When a traditional telecom provider ports your number to S&S, it’s not tied to any physical location. This means you’re then free to move premises without any disruption to your phones.
To port your number, simply sign up with S&S and submit a porting form within your account manager. This then triggers a request with your host operator to transfer the number across.
If you’ve been using a traditional landline provider, your numbers are likely to be tied to analogue lines. These appear on your bill as PSTN or ISDN. You may also have blocks of numbers known as DDI blocks.
Before you Port:
- Do not cancel services with your existing provider until the number porting process has been complete. The port is triggered by S&S with your existing provider.
- Remove hunting from your lines before you port.
- If the telephone number you want to keep also has your DSL broadband running on it, ensure you separate this before you submit your request to port. How to do this is by requesting your existing provider to virtualise the number.
- Have a soft copy of your bill ready to be uploaded as proof of ownership that clearly displays your UAN number.
- Don’t forget that lifts, franking machines, analogue credit card terminals, monitored alarms and traditional faxes all run on analogue phone lines. You’ll need to retain some PSTN lines to preserve these.
- Check that you’ve paid up your bills with your existing provider. A port can be rejected for outstanding bills.
- If you only want to port some numbers or one number be sure to check that this is not part of a larger block. If it is part of a block of numbers they must all port in together. A way to avoid this is to request that the other numbers be turned into virtual lines. This can take 9 working days to virtualise and your UAN may change as a result.
Porting Forms
- Porting forms for both landline and mobile are available from within the customer portal.
- For Non-Geographic numbers these require a signed authorisation.
Guideline Times for Porting:
- PSTN, ISDN BRA or Virtual Line – 2 working days
- ISDN High Speed, PRA, FRA, Non-Geographic Numbers & all others – 10 working days