hello,
I started a new contract with vodafone, 15th may. I specified that i wanted to port my existing phone number. I transferred to city fibre internet/ vodafone. I can make phone calls outward but cannot receive calls. The caller gets an immediate "number not recognised" fault.
It has been a week without access to my number and I have gone on the customer services merry-go-round. I have started an official complaint. I have also had the "48 hours" excuse from the "pro-active" team manager. Looking at the woeful stories here, I am not optimistic that the situation will change. I did however manage to extricate details of their auto compensation for this after suffering some lies from customer services.
What needs to happen is that my situation is explained to a competent engineer who knows the system and can take action. It makes you wonder if any of these people are left in the company. The symptoms of the problem are clear cut. - surely customer services can consult their knowledge base and think "oh we've had this one before, pass it on to charlie gibbons in engineering"
When I first got the number years ago it was assigned by Telewest and this company was swallowed up by Virgin Media. The number is for an edinburgh exchange 0131 476 xxxx. I believe the "476" is the Virgin area code.
I have changed phone and internet providers over the years and this number has been ported to Orange (who became EE) and recently to Plusnet.
I didn't therefore think it would be a problem transferring it to Vodafone and changing from a copper landline to VOIP calls provided by the Vodafone router.
I am unsure of the technical details on porting the number (maybe an expert could enlighten me), but I think that Virgin Media have always had control of the number, as calls are routed to them first and they perform a lookup in their database and return details of the new provider that handles the call.
The fact that I have changed providers in the past suggests that the phone number is transferable. The "split port" suggests that Virgin have not updated their database.
So somebody has messed up here. Is the fact that Virgin media are involved causing the hold up ? I would be interested to know what is involved in the exchange between companies when the number is ported and why this causes so many problems in this modern age of instant communications. Is it due to bloody mindedness of companies wanting to hold on to their customers.? This all seems to go against the rules put out by Ofcom.
