I am moving to France in a few weeks I have signed up to Orange for landline and Internet can i still use a different VOIP provider to have a UK number as I need this for work?
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I don’t think it will be an issue - Orange use a separate VLAN for their own VoIP traffic as far as I am aware.
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We use Vonage (UK) in France (and Orange for Internet) and still have our UK number, when in UK we used to use Vonage as we only had fibre Internet to our home with no phone line. Having UK number makes it easy (and cheap) for our parents & children to ring us.
With Orange we only have broadband but no analogue phone line - therefore no phone number via Orange - Ă strange concept but true. You can pay for broadband with one bill and a separate bill for an analogue phone line. We only have the broadband part.
We recently through Vonage also obtained a French telephone number and an international phone calls pack allowing us to call phones & mobiles in France and many other countries for free.
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When I first moved to France and still had UK clients I set up a UK geographical number with Skype, which I liked because it was so easy to take calls whatever country I was in, on a landline or on my mobile. But this is going back many years, probably all VOIP providers offer that facility now.
I also tried Sontel who I think were very competitive but I seem to recall I had a few issues with them, it didn’t work as seamlessly as Skype. They still send me emails about their new services and it must be 10 years since I stopped using them.
When I had an Orange internet connection I did not pay for an analogue line but was issued with a French phone number for all my VOIP calls. I thought that was the norm. I can’t believe that you were not issued with a French number. There was no need for me to have a local number for my family friends to call me as all of their international calls are included in their own VOIP packages.
For me the issue is not that I have a French number the company I work for need a UK number to put the calls through to
You probably do have an Orange VOIP number Mat, look at your Orange contract, I think it’s on the top left. I used to have an Orange internet connection AND analog line (they insisted before degroupage) but I dumped the analog line as soon as it was unbundled and just used the VOIP number.
Likewise, we managed to keep our old landline number 0555xxxxxxxx but friends who have just moved have now got an 09xxxx voip number
As I understand it, you would need a French number for the calls to be routed to. Unless you want them routed to your mobile, which might be more expensive.
Not with a VOIP solution.
Yep of course, I had a senior moment there lol.
A few months after moving to France, I switched my UK mobile number to a UK VOIP provider because O2 were threatening to charge me extra for being abroad too much. Andrews & Arnold (https://www.aa.net.uk/) are, AIUI, one of the few providers that will let you “port in” mobile numbers.
Good ISP - expensive but worth it; I knew their MD vaguely at uni.
I am resident in UK but have a holiday home in France. In the UK I have a Voip phone service by Sipgate UK which is installed on my Gigaset Dect phone base station (Go Box 100). Some routers also have the facility but Gigaset make the set up easy. There is no line rental (internet by Airband is of course charged). In addition to calls on the home phone you can install an app on your mobile, I use ZoiPer but there are others, so you can receive UK calls where ever you are in the world provided you have an active internet connection (3G, 4G & 5G work too). The only downside is when the phone rings at home we get 2 mobiles and the house phone with different ring tones all going off! I also have a Gigaset phone in France so have installed Sipgate on the base station and get calls there too. The Gigaset base station is set up to email me whenever there is a missed call and inform me if a message was left; it DOESN’T relay the message as Vonage would. You only pay for calls no fixed charge and I find it very cheap. You add credit, this can be done automatically or alternatively receive an email when credit falls below a sum of your choosing.
I previously tried Vonage but if there was an internet interruption more often than not I had to reboot the Vonage box and my router. Vonage also relays messages to their mobile app with a .wav file which was good. They also attempt speech to text which gave us frequent laughs at the “translation” of names. For our usage , which is low, it was much more expensive than Sipgate.
I have a question and wonder if anyone can help; we have SOSH fibre internet in France, basic package at €29.99 a month with the Voip phone. Perfectly adequate for our needs but the telephone is really redundant. Does anyone know if there is a internet package without phone available that may be cheaper. Almost all the calls we get a scams anyway.
I doubt it these days.
There used to be Internet nu - but essentially all packages with the phone service provided via  the internet are “Internet nu” in those terms.
It costs so little to the service provider to add VoIP on top of the basic Internet service that I suspect they wopn’t bother unbundling it.
Just don’t plug the phone in.