90+ Days Without Voice Service

It’s been well over 90 days since I last paid AT&T for voice service on my cell phone and started using an iPad SIM and a SIP solution to make calls from my iPhone. Things have been good, great in fact., that is until I recently ran into a major issue with my setup. A brief recap, I use Google Voice for my phone number, I then have a SIP number setup with IPKall which is connected to my pbxes.com account, which in turn is setup with Acrobits Softphone on my iPhone.

Last week, for whatever reason, IPKall let someone else register the same number as me. So randomly my phone wouldn’t ring through, or if I didn’t pick up when someone called, the caller would ring through to this other guy. Kind of a major issue.

After some back and forth with IPKall, I got a notification from Google Voice that someone using the same number as me had successfully added it  to their Google Voice account. Great.

At this point instead of trying to resolve things with the folks at IPKall who were being less than helpful, I called up the guy who had registered my number and explained the situation.  Oddly enough he used my own tutorial to setup his account, in the end he was very understanding and we eventually got the number transfered back to me. I should note that the number I registered in the tutorial is not actually the number I’ve been using from IPKall, so this guy had no way of purposely registering the same number as me.

Now I’m looking for a more reliable SIP number provider, even if I have to pay a few bucks a month I think it’d be worth it to ensure that my number doesn’t randomly get handed out to someone else. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know in the comments.