VF lost landline number

[mbacon1978]

Does anyone know the internal procedure when porting a number from another provider to VF? I ask as 5 weeks ago my mother in law upgraded her VF Broadband package and in doing so VF have "lost" her landline number - the number she has had for around 50 years. After 5 weeks of being passed around various members of the support team, none of them appear to have the technical knowledge to fix their mistake. They don't even know how a number is ported by their own systems!! They just stumble over their words saying the Sales Team deal with it.

All we are currently being told is that they are unable to find it and she will need to keep the new number (which has the wrong area code to add insult to injury). She has of course been offered small amount of compensation as well as the opportunity to leave but that is a total insult quite frankly. If she leaves (VF have broken the contract through incompetence) then they wash their hands of the issue so I can see why they are keen for her to do that. The financial compensation doesn't even cover the time that has already been spent dealing with members of support or the time to contact hospitals, GP surgeries as well as everyone in her address book to inform them of her new number. She currently cannot access her online banking which uses her landline for authorisation. As she lives in a rural village, the nearest bank is a 3-4 hour round trip!!

We had a final call with support this week and it is clear no resolution or solution can be applied by VF so we will be taking this matter to Ofcom for resolution.

We have also been told, I expect incorrectly, that VF are currently unable to port ANY number to their system due to a technical issue with a resolution date that is undetermined. So if you find yourself in the same situation, please take the complaint to Ofcom. If you are about to move your landline to VF, don't! You will loose your existing landline number if the support staff are to be believed.

If anyone from VF is reading this and knows how to fix this issue please reach out to me.

[Racal-Yodafone]

I am not an expert on this subject but did a tonne of research a year ago when I moved into a new house with no copper phone line and had to get a VoIP landline instead. From the notes I made at the time, quote, "Currently, numbers originally supplied by Cable & Wireless cannot be ported as no agreement exists between them and BT.". Cable & Wireless' UK internet infrastructure was bought by Vodafone in, from memory, 2012. Landline numbers assigned by Vodafone are from blocks originally assigned to Cable & Wireless. If ex-C&W numbers, i.e. Vodafone numbers, cannot be ported to BT then logic suggests a BT number cannot be ported to Vodafone. I'm sorry to hear that your mum has lost her landline number of 50 years and being allocated a number with the wrong area code must be very disconcerting for her. I hope you can get some resolution to this. I was just lucky that I had moved to a different area code anyway so knew I was going to get a new phone number. I did get allocated a number with the correct area code for my new house though. Does your mum live right on the edge of an area code? I only ask that because, when I was a kid, my mum & dad's phone area code was at the northernmost edge of the old Maybole area and, in fact, some houses slightly south of them had an Alloway area number. Their house having a Maybole number was probably a result of a human decision in an office at some point in history. Such decisions nowadays are made by computer which is why I was asking if your mum lives at the edge of her previous area code geographical area. Possibly a computer thought she should have the area code of an adjacent area instead?