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Using your main mobile number via VoIP (with A&A)

Lucian

ULTIMATE Member
Hi folks,

So it's been a couple of months now that I have ported my main mobile number into A&A's VoIP system and wanted to share my experience so far.

First and foremost, I am talking here about my main _MOBILE_ number, not fixed number or anything else. This is the number family call me on, the number I get SMS on (including 2FA codes) etc, so it's a big deal.

I've jumped at this technological solution because I wanted to be free for a while to jump from mobile deal to mobile deal, while not being too stressed about porting my number to different operators every couple of months.

So, how has it been?

Pros:

1 - Porting in was painless, just needed that code from my previous operator.
2 - A&A have been brilliant on the one time I needed assistance, which is why I went with them - wouldn't trust my number with anyone else.
3 - The ability to have multiple VoIP apps installed all over (phone, PC, physical phone) and talk on any of them is brilliant, I found I much prefer talking over the "phone" using the headset and microphone on my PC, same ones I use with teleconferencing software (zoom, teams etc) as I am alas seated in front of a PC for good part of the day.
4 - A&A allow me to record all my calls and have them emailed to me - this is a great feature and got me out of trouble with the missus a few times (of course I wasn't listening!).
This feature is also great if you want to go over recordings with other people from which you want to retrieve forgotten information. The call recordings are very small and encoded mp3.
5 - SMSs come as emails, so they're stored nicely in my inbox.

Cons:

1 - A&A only have a single payg tariff, so you pay for every minute that you talk, however this is not as much of a problem as I do not make many or long outgoing calls and when I do I usually use the "minutes" included on whatever "hot deal" I am using at the moment, although the "strange new" number might confuse certain people. :)
2 - As I said SMS come in as emails, this can mean notifications for new texts depend on your email app, so something to watch out for; not a problem for me.
3 - I left the biggest problem at the end, the VoIP apps - I had quite a few problems with them.
Some will have trouble connecting due to network restrictions, NAT, double NAT and so on. I have found I had problems with VoIP on EE and not as many on Three. Some apps would work, but absolutely shatter battery life as they run continuously in the background.. And some other ones do indeed implement some sort of notifications to save your battery, but this means they are actually taking over client role and login to your VoIP account from their servers - a bit of a privacy and security concern.

In the end I have opted to just forward the calls from the A&A VoIP to whatever is the number I am using in the phone at the moment and this works without problems, however I am paying for the time I am talking on the phone like this, so hey.. small problem.

This month's bill from A&A is about £3.5 and I am paying Lyca £0.45/m, so a grand total of about £4. I'll cancel Lyca when their promo expires and jump on whatever else will be "hot" at that moment.
So, is it worth it to do what I do, financially? No. I could have just paid Lebara £5 for a great offering and not bother with any of this.

Is it worth doing this for the extra control and flexibility that you get by using a VoIP account? Well, yes it is!

However, it is also fun and I have to admit, I will not go back to a traditional operator very soon.

In the future I would love to play with my own PBX at home (or cloud) and somehow find a way to use proper VoIP apps in a more battery friendly way without sacrificing privacy or security, maybe via UnifiedPush or other free software solutions.

Hope you enjoyed reading about my experience and feel free to comment below. :)
 
You're sacrificing security simply by using a VoIP provider that doesn't offer any form of VoIP Encryption such as A&A. I'm not dissing them, I use them! As long as you choose well known and trusted apps/Software such as Acrobits, then you should be OK. FYI - I use Acrobits Groundwire
 
You're sacrificing security simply by using a VoIP provider that doesn't offer any form of VoIP Encryption such as A&A. I'm not dissing them, I use them! As long as you choose well known and trusted apps/Software such as Acrobits, then you should be OK. FYI - I use Acrobits Groundwire
Yes, voip security is an issue, wish they had tls.
Acrobits alas didn't work on my lineageos.
 
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Do you get HD Voice?
 
Nice writeup @Lucian I have considered doing something similar myself for most of the same reasons, and that I want to have the freedom to live/work in Europe (I'm a dual Irish national so I have FoM across the EU still) but to keep my UK number and people can call that and not have to pay for calling an international number.

I have experimented with my own PBX in the past and it worked very well, I would use a Huawei 3G dongle plugged into a raspberry pi and run asterisx pretty much the same as this https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-gsm-gateway/

Actually I recently dug out all that kit to have another go at it, but what concerns me now is the cutting off of 2G/3G networks because most of the chan_dongle working dongles for this are 3G. I don't see many (if any) 4G ones doing it. There are of course commercial GSM VoIP gateways but they tend to be hideously expensive for what they are.

Anyway, fun topic, my mobile contracts are ending in 5 months and I had been thinking about going data only on my phone. My family all call with whatsapp / telegram anyway and most of the time I find if i've got a signal, then i've got data, rarely have I got signal but no data.

Here's my old GSM SIP gateway in the loft.

fEWSGJ3.jpg
 
Nice one @dabigm
Very nice setup, but yeah, 3G going away will pose some problems, however we still have 2G for a while.
I also read that raspberrypi article and was rearing to go, but I think for my main number I am happier having it with A&A, I think they're a little bit more reliable than a Pi in my loft. :)

I was pondering real hard to go data only last evening, what stopped me was the fact that using a regular Lebara or whatever SIM gives me those free minutes I can use to call the doctor or the bank and so on and we all know you can spend a long time there. Using A&A for that would get expensive.
Also, as you have read I am currently using call forwarding in order to avoid those battery-hungry VoIP apps .. so that would break.

I will look into this more in the future, I believe some sort of UnifiedPush from a PBX with a UP-aware VoIP client such as Jami might work on my LineageOS phone, but this is a story for another time.
 
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Yes I think for me the solution would be to port my "main" number over to some cheap PAYG solution since it would probably be mostly for incoming calls/text and to also carry around a SIM that has free minutes but unlimited data.

Not sure what to do to be honest. Will have to have a think about it. But I am seriously looking at buying a place abroad now (have been for a while, but cemented that feeling at the beginning of 2023 and now actively looking/saving for a place) and I will absolutely want to keep a local UK SIM going. I've also been wondering where to put it since I'll most likely be renting out my home in the UK while i'm not here. So do I put it at my mum's place? do I rent a server in a data centre? yeah, all stuff I need to figure out.

Does AAISP charge you for incoming calls? or just outgoing? and can you SMS back via email too? or just receive?

Can you also detail how you moved the number? and to what product?

At the end of the day, all I really need is the ability for people to call my UK SIM and for me to get those calls/texts wherever I am, but without roaming/carrying that SIM with me. As you probably already know, you can usually only roam for some small number of days. O2 for example is 63 days in any four-month period.
 
@dabigm Good luck with moving. Thinking of Ireland or somewhere warmer?

AAISP do not charge for incoming calls or SMS, just outgoing.
SMS are not sent via email, they have a web UI for that and also there is an API, so there are options.

I think for your scenario A&A work very well. One thing I forgot, they have a £1.5 monthly charge for hosting your number with them. You'll get charged at least that amount even if you do not make calls or send SMS.

Here is the A&A tariff:
 
Andrews & Arnold use the G711a (alaw) codec. So, No HD Voice. You'd need a ITSP that supports G.722 (there are plenty).

I have no audio issues myself using Andrews & Arnold. I guess it comes down to how good a data connection one has at the time of making or receiving a call.
I will stick to my smarty calling then, clear calls are high on my list of what a network can do.
 
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@dabigm Good luck with moving. Thinking of Ireland or somewhere warmer?

AAISP do not charge for incoming calls or SMS, just outgoing.
SMS are not sent via email, they have a web UI for that and also there is an API, so there are options.

I think for your scenario A&A work very well. One thing I forgot, they have a £1.5 monthly charge for hosting your number with them. You'll get charged at least that amount even if you do not make calls or send SMS.

Here is the A&A tariff:
Thanks. We don't have any family in Ireland, I got my Irish passport through my maternal grandmother who was born in the republic. But she moved to England in the 1940s and my mum was born in England and lived here all her life. At the moment, it's a toss up between Spain/Portugal and Turkey. I suppose the smart thing to do would be to rent in those places and see which one we like the best.

The AA stuff is very interesting but the call costs are quite high, a one hour call to a UK mobile at peak time for example would be £2.40 !! But for incoming calls / texts I guess it would be comparatively low, but what I would like would be the ability to call out on my UK mobile number over VoIP and with a bundle or unlimited calls to keep the costs down.

Will have to see what to do but it does look good at least for the incoming stuff
 
@dabigm sounds like a plan.
We're looking forward to your 5G reports from all those countries. :D

Re A&A, yeah, it'd be handy to find something cheaper or put a Pi at your mum's.
 
Well I got some time to play around this evening, and I got my GSM -> SIP gateway going again.

I also managed to find a Polish tech guy on Youtube who is also into all this stuff, and it looks like I may have found a solution to the turning off the 2G/3G network issue.

In this video, he discusses setting up asterisk and connecting it to a mobile phone over bluetooth using chan_mobile (a project similar to chan_dongle). This would be a neat solution since you can always keep a cheap but present-technology mobile connected.


I recently also managed to bag a batteryless lenovo tablet that has LTE on it (for £34 new too :cool:), so i'm going to see if I can use that too since keeping a mobile plugged in has it's issues with batteries too.

Sorry to @Lucian for hijacking the thread and making it about asterisk and PBXs lol. But I think what i'm going to do is to do both. I'd like to have a service with AA with a mobile number, and also run my own. This way I can give clients the number with AAISP and have a reliable managed service that I accept incoming calls on, but I can give friends / family / others my personal mobile number that I run on my own PBX and be able to make cheap calls out on (much cheaper than using AAISP). So I think i'll go for the best of both worlds approach. Then if the personal one stops working, no biggie, won't be losing money not being able to talk to clients.
 
@dabigm sounds good, Nice find with the tablet, I really appreciate devices that can run without the battery nowadays.
That said, I run LineageOS on all my phones and also AccA, the "smart" battery manager, so I never let them charge too much for too long, so it's not of any _real_ concern to me.
Keep us updated how it goes, I will probably want to implement something like this at some point.
 
@dabigm sounds good, Nice find with the tablet, I really appreciate devices that can run without the battery nowadays.
That said, I run LineageOS on all my phones and also AccA, the "smart" battery manager, so I never let them charge too much for too long, so it's not of any _real_ concern to me.
Keep us updated how it goes, I will probably want to implement something like this at some point.
yep will let you know soon. decided to run this on my low-powered dell wyze thin client instead of a pi. Re: battery stuff yeah I also limit my battery charging, but batteryless and plugged in constantly gives me more confidence if I'm going to leave it plugged in 24x7. I also limit charging on my pixel / samsung tablet as I want them to last. But I used to have a lenovo tablet I used for playing music / controlling smart devices plugged in constantly and after a year the battery swelled so much it bulged out of it's casing :oops:

should get chan_mobile hopefully setup tomorrow (well today, thursday) if not, weekend project!

Cheers
 
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I have ported my main mobile number into A&A's VoIP system
This is interesting. Though I've done the same thing, it's for an entirely different reason.

I work abroad for most of the year and only come back to the UK for a month or so each year. My main mobile number is obviously fairly important to me and so with A&A it's the most reliable and cost-effective solution.

I initially tried with VPNs to re-direct WiFi Calling traffic specifically and just keep my UK SIM, but when I was away from home I'd often be stung for incoming call charges and this was a bit annoying. Even a call being directed to voicemail would end up charging me as foreign usage.

I use Acrobits Groundwire, it's the best of the bunch but it's not totally reliable. Sometimes calls can drop, if you move from WiFi to 4/5G it can't maintain the connection etc. Other times the call just won't answer. 80% of the time it's great though.

When I do come home, I just port the number back onto a 30 day UK SIM with data and use my number as usual. In my experience, using VoIP over UK mobile networks in the UK isn't really the most reliable experience. Then once I leave, I just port it back to A&A.

One thing I wish A&A would do is bring some kind of small package to cover a little usage. I currently pay Skype £2.40/month for unlimited landline calls which serves my pretty well.
 
VoIP prices are going up too much now. I've had to stop using sipgate as they've put up their prices too high. Example, UK mobile phone call is now 9.9p per minute. It's a funny world when mobile phone companies charge less than VoIP companies.

Has anyone tried the AAISP SIP2SIM card? Looks kinda cool rather than run a VoIP app you can have this SIM. Their "global SIM" looks even more interesting since it should work on any network.
 
Has anyone tried the AAISP SIP2SIM card? Looks kinda cool rather than run a VoIP app you can have this SIM. Their "global SIM" looks even more interesting since it should work on any network.
I took this maybe 5 years ago but didn't really use it. It basically acts like a SIP 'softphone' but it's a SIM card. You get charged for minutes to and from the SIM card (via any SIP provider) but then whatever your SIP charges are on top of that. Plus the data is very expensive.
 
Has anyone tried the AAISP SIP2SIM card? Looks kinda cool rather than run a VoIP app you can have this SIM. Their "global SIM" looks even more interesting since it should work on any network.
I have two here (O2/EU roaming SIP2SIM Voice mobile SIM card) but they were unusable for me. When inserted into a modern Android phone (S21 Ultra, Pixel 6), I kept getting a network status popup notice that requires manual intervention to get rid of it. Basically, their dual identity SIM's send a service message every minute or two to *02# (in the background). These service messages are to do with profile switching but rendered the service unusable for me! No, I haven't tried them on an Apple iPhone. I did try one on a basic Dorro phone and it worked just fine on that. Go figure!!!

There is a £2.00 a month "line rental" charge. Data is unusable as it's so expensive! Calls (Incoming/Outbound) cost 2p per minute to landlines, 10p per minute to mobiles and text cost 2p each (Incoming/Outbound) if my memory serves me right. All prices are plus VAT.
 
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