Adventures in phone number porting

We were recently helping a client port some numbers from a traditional telecom carrier (Spectrum) to a VOIP carrier. The scheduled time for the transition came and the PBX was configured to receive calls from the new VOIP trunk. We tested calling the phone numbers and they showed up in the PBX as expected, so all seemed OK.

A few days later, the client (a medical imaging center) called and said “a referring physican is trying to fax something to us and they’re saying that our number is out of service. I called the number and got fax tones so I assumed the doctor’s office just made a mistake.

But – this kept happening. After days of troubleshooting (the client is successfully receiving faxes from other senders all during this time), I was finally able to reproduce the problem calling from one particular phone line. It finally occurred to me that the line I was calling from was a Spectrum line and we had just ported the number away from Spectrum. We checked with the location that was having trouble faxing our client, and – sure enough, they had Spectrum phone lines as well.

Apparently when Spectrum ported the number out, it worked for the rest of the world but if you were originating a call inside the Spectrum voice network – some configuration hadn’t been changed so from that point of view – it thought this was still an “internal” (to the Spectrum network) call but there was no active line there. Hence – the “this number is out of service” recording.

It took a couple of weeks of working with different people at Spectrum to get this corrected, but they finally did. This definitely falls in the Murphy’s Law category (“whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”). I didn’t even know this was a thing that could wrong.

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