Bit of background; had ZEN FTTP installed a couple of months ago (documented here:
https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,25446.0.html ). Coming from EE VDSL, which I left in place while making the the FTTP install was sound.
The service is working phenomenally well. I had considered keeping the FTTC as backup, but really it's £25 a month I could do with keeping in my pocket, and the FTTC has so many shared points of failure with FTTP that I'm not sure it is a very good fallback option. So fallback will be 3, 4G based (see here:
https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,26059.0.html)
I have a few months left on my 18 month EE contract which I was planning on just letting run; however it turns out they work out their cancellation by taking off any discounts you have, and also any charges they will save to Openreach. This makes the cancellation for 4 remaining months only £20. So I'm porting the number to A&A. This should cause a cease on the EE VDSL service. The savings in line rental will pay for my preloaded 4G SIM card.
Once I have the number on VOIP, I planned to add the VOIP service to mine and my wife's mobile phone. Not sure yet if I'll get an adapter so that I can use the VOIP number on the existing DECT handsets in the house. On the one hand, it's nice to have a phone in the house always wired up, on the other hand, extra cost. I guess I could equally get a hard-wired SIP phone / DECT base station. The Zen contract came with a Fritzbox router too which does support some voice capabilities, and I wonder if perhaps it might even be possible to use that just to interface the old DECT phones to SIP without using it as a router (I use Ubiquiti gear for most of the networking in the house.
Timeline of the port (will update):
14/06/2021 - Went on A&A VOIP page and arranged to have a VOIP account, requesting a port in of my number.
15/06/2021 - Email from a person at A&A confirming the account details for the number being transferred in (I had confirmed during application I thought, perhaps they are just thorough).
16/06/2021 - Email from same person at A&A confirming port in date / time as 22/06/21 10am
22/06/2021 - 10.05am - VOIP incoming calls and voicemail appear to be working fine from my landline number to Android device on office wifi. VDSL ceased service around same time.
I did try using my account details on my mobile phone for SIP setup and they didn't work yet. I don't know if this is because they don't work until the inbound number is attached, or whether there is some other networking issue. I will dig into this a bit when I have a moment, as I would like to ideally know the SIP is up and running before the number ports so we don't have a loss of service on the number. Any thoughts on this?