I moved my “land line” from Spectrum (and AT&T would have been similar) over to the YS fiber network using Voice Over IP (VOIP) about 10 days ago and it has been running well. No downtime, no loss of voice quality. Since, at least for the pilot, YS is not offering any voice connectivity, some form of VOIP is the only way to have a landline telephone. Of course an alternative is to skip the landline altogether and just use cell phones. For some background on VOIP you can read my introduction here.

What follows is my narrative of what I did and what decisions I had to make to be successful. I had a nice cordless phone and a normal YS 937-767-xxxx phone number that I wanted to keep. The phone had my directory and provided answering and voice messaging. I’m guessing it was similar to 90% of the current phones out there. I mention this because most VOIP providers can replace your phone’s capabilities with their own and you have to decide where you want, for example, your voice messaging and recording to occur. It was far easier for me to just continue letting my current phone behave as it currently does.

First order of business is to select a voip provider. My main criteria was price and support for my current phone system and number. I came across voip.ms because of the price and they appeared to have a competent system that would work with my current phone. Be careful on the pricing – there’s almost always “regulatory fees” that can add significantly to the price. But still you should end up paying a lot less than either Spectrum or AT&T.

I then found an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) that was compatible with voip.ms. In their case, almost any ATA (or phone that has a built-in ATA) that runs SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) should work. I settled on a Grandstream HT802, about $40. I started out with one of voip.ms’s phone numbers to test it and also tried to be sure that my 767 number could be ported from Spectrum to voip.ms.

The voip.ms web site was full of options, befitting how much function the voip provider can supply that previously were supplied by the phone itself. For example, how many rings should there be before the provider decides to do something – like answer the phone, disconnect the call, transfer it to another phone, etc. I ended up specifying lots of rings so my phone would end up answering first, which duplicated its behavior with Spectrum.

I connected the ATA to the local ethernet lan and it by default obtained an IP address via DHCP from the ONT. I logged into the ONT and used the mac address printed on the bottom of the ATA to figure out the IP address and logged into the ATA. Here’s the screen shot from the ONT:

192.168.0.102 is the ATA, subject to change, but unlikely. I then logged into the ATA and basically entered the IP address and login information that was specified by voip.ms for one of their servers. After a minute or so lights went green and a dial tone was provided to the phone I plugged into the back of the ATA.

Once I made sure it worked ok on the new fiber network it was time to transfer the 767 phone number. The new provider, voip.ms, provided me clear instructions on how to initiate the process. I sent them a scan of my Spectrum bill, which included my Spectrum pin and my signature. They in turn contacted Spectrum, who never contacted me directly to confirm the move. Spectrum supplied an FOC (firm order completion) date about a week away.

During that week I tested both phones and they continued to run as they previously had. Then, on the morning of the FOC my 767 number moved from my Spectrum modem to my YS fiber ONT and ATA. Kinda like magic. Curiously, the temporary test number still worked, meaning that with at least this provider you can pay for multiple phone numbers, all of which can be active on the same connection. I was impressed with how smoothly the entire installation went.