Some Web Telephones Can’t Reuse Numbers

This is going to, quite frankly, give VoIP a bad name. Not being able to take phone numbers with you when going from service to service in the VoIP world is unbelievable. While I can’t really point specific fingers at anyone just yet, I can still take a moment to grumble about it.

Kirsten Dixson was proud to be an early adopter when she signed up her career coaching business for Internet-based telephone service earlier this year.

She soon came to regret her tech savvy when bad sound quality made her long for traditional phone service. Then the other shoe dropped - she couldn’t take her number with her to another provider.

As so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, gets more popular, providers are faced with a relatively new issue: how to handle customer turnover. There are no exact figures on how many customers have tried to switch their numbers away from VoIP providers, but the Federal Communications Commission says that a total of 41.7 million phone numbers got transferred last year, including land lines and cellular.

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