Sole's Blog

Having a business that expands to multiple markets, also means purchasing domain names, advertising and phone numbers. Having multiple phone numbers and especially international phone numbers, thru the regular phone pusher is something that can quickly become hugely expensive. So when asked by a not for profit organization, how they could have multiple international phone numbers for their customers to contact them, I started looking thru the different SIP providers.

After quite a lot of research and some testing. I found LocalPhone that offers SIP services for international lines and numbers at a low cost. They of course offer all the usual services, such as a SIP connection to receive calls directly, SIP trunks, SIP international calls dirt cheap, redirects, voicemail and so on.

So how do you get more than one number on your regular phone line without the whole SIP thingy ? Just buy the numbers you want, direct them to your SIP account and set your SIP account to call your regular phone number. This solution is great if you have multiple numbers and limited talking time on the numbers. Because you will pay a very small amount for each minute they are redirected to your regular phone. But the cost of the numbers are dirt cheap compared to other solutions, see their prices here.

If you need to talk a lot on the international numbers, it is free to receive calls if you can receive them by VOIP to your own SIP software client, SIP server or SIP phone unit. A real cheap and simple solution would be a small box that converts the SIP phone to regular phone jack (like the Linksys PAP2T or the Linksys SPA3102), that you can put pretty much any regular phone into, including DECT handsets. For business purposes look at something slightly better like the GigaSet IP Pro DECT phones work well. (Also tried some SNOM IP DECT phones, but they were not very stable.)

The numbers I needed was in the EU and costed less than 1 euro per month, but some are more expensive. You can see prices for incoming numbers here.

If its still June 2012 when you read this, use this coupon to get 10% discount on your first deposit. “JUNE2012“ If not try the current month and year?