My Phone Power Experience (The First Two Weeks) – Yes you can port in Canadian Phone Numbers.
I just signed up with Phone Power two weeks ago tempted by their Obi Talk Unlimited plan - $59.99 per year with unlimited Canada/US calling, and 60 international minutes per month along with caller id and all the other bells and whistles. Since sign up I have had a couple bumps in the road and not everything is fixed yet, but I thought I would share my experience so far.
When you sign up for the Obi Talk plan it takes you through a sign up wizard where it asks you all your core basic information, credit card information, etc. One thing to note is Phone Power does not normally allow caller ID spoofing information but during sign up (as this promotion is to take Google voice customers) – it allows you to enter a phone number you want to display as your outgoing caller ID. (I entered the number I would be eventually porting to Phone Power) If you don't do this at this step – you will NOT be able to change it later. If you don't enter anything it will show the phone number you choose from Phone power as the outgoing caller ID. NOTE: If you do enter another phone number on this step...when you call someone it will show as UNKNOWN NAME and the phone number you choose to display. If you later go to Phone Power under settings and switch your CNAM display to Yes – it now shows your name JOHN DOE and your number displays as LONG DISTANCE or UNKNOWN. You have to reset or re-provision your Obi Talk so that it goes back to Unknown Name and showing your number. As I choose to "spoof" my phone number I am unsure what it does if you skip that step on sign up.
I signed up and started the Porting process to port my local Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada Phone number from Shaw Cable to Phone Power. This was simple enough as sending an email to Phone Power and attaching a copy of my most recent Shaw Cable Bill. The Port Request was submitted and the phone number was transferred from Shaw to Phone Power exactly 7 days later (They quote you 5-10 business days). At least in Winnipeg it appears that Phone Power gets their phone numbers from Distributel – which is the same as
VOIP.MS for Winnipeg who told me they could not port my number (another story). After the port was completed I noticed that something was wrong, when certain people called from cell phones it rang my new Phone Power telephone and certain people still rang my old Shaw phone which was still active. I could also dial out from each phone with the same phone number. I emailed Phone Power that night about the situation. The next evening I still had not heard back from Phone Power so I decided to phone tech support. I called about 5pm CST and was advised that I needed to speak to a level 2 tech support agent and that one would call me back once they were off their next call. Over two hours later around 7:30pm CST I called again as I had not heard from anyone and was transferred to level 2 tech support agent who basically called me a liar, and said that Phone Power made no errors in the port process and basically I should be calling Shaw because they screwed up. I also asked him why calling 511 did not work when 311 works fine, he told me that's because you're in Canada and we don't support 511 for Canadians. I asked if not supported why does it say so on your website and why does 311 work, he replied "that's just the way it is" He did not want to look into the port issue, or the 511 issue (when you look at phone power call logs, it shows 511 dialed as 1511...which I am sure what is causing the error...but who am I to say anything).
I then called Shaw Cable tech support from my new phone power phone, and spoke to a very helpful representative in Victoria, BC. She advised me that when Phone providers initiate the port process they are also supposed to send instructions to terminate the old service which Phone Power/Distributel did not, because this is an automated process the computer on Shaw's end gave over the phone number but did not terminate the service. The Shaw representative was very helpful and even did MULTIPLE test calls to confirm that Shaw Calls, Telus calls (a land line in BC), and that others could still call me after she terminated the Shaw phone service. She also sent a tech support ticket to their back end to close up all the loose ends that Distributel forgot to tell Shaw to do. All was well except that certain family members of mine who are also Shaw customers could now not call me at all...they would get a busy signal. It took a second call the next day to Shaw tech support and they manually updated some routing tables and now everyone call me on same phone number now located at Phone Power. Had Phone Power/Distributel processed the port request properly, I would have saved three whole evenings of calling tech support to get my new phone service working.
As of today though my phone is working in the sense I can receive calls from everyone and I can call out no problem. The voice quality is EXCELLENT and the Price is amazing. Other than my terrible experience with tech support, I am quite happy with this new service, however there are still some quirks about it – and I am hesitant to call tech support based on my last experience. The issues are listed below;
SOME ISSUES I AM STILL HAVING / OTHERS I HAVE CORRECTED;
1. I still cannot call 511 from my phone. In Manitoba – 511 should direct to 204-945-3704 (within Winnipeg) and 1-877-MBRoads (627-6237) outside Winnipeg. When you dial 511 on the phone it says "We're sorry your call did not go through will you please try your call again. The number you dialed 511 was rejected by the service provider reason is 500" Also if you login to the Phone Power website and look at your call logs it shows the call as calling 1511 rather than 511...so something is not programmed correctly. Yet 311 works fine for the city of Winnipeg.
2. I had set up Call Forward rules to ring both the home phone and my cell phone at the same time (Simultaneous Ring). I quickly noticed that the caller ID information would display perfectly fine on the home phone but was not getting passed to the cell phone at all. It was driving me nuts but I figured out how to fix it. On the phone power website you are given the option to enter a fail-safe number if your service isn't working it will call that number. As the fail safe number was my cell, I don't know if this was causing problems, but I removed the fail-safe number from the online portal and now when someone calls me the caller ID information is displayed on both my home phone and cell phone....so I fixed that myself by removing the fail-safe number.
3. I don't know if because I initially entered the spoof number when I signed up or not, but I noticed that when I call people it's about a 50/50 chance that they will see me name and number when I am calling them, the other ½ of the time it shows as "UNKNOWN" Also certain phone numbers (especially my cell phone – the same one set to forward to) – it ALWAYS shows Unknown when calling from the home phone. There is some setting somewhere that is still not working properly and I don't know how to fix it, but I think maybe the system still thinks I want to use the "spoofed" number even though it's now the same as my current number. Even when viewing my call logs on the Phone Power website I can see that some calls do not send the caller ID information as the name line is blank. I don't know if this needs to be reset on their end or what, but for now I am just leaving it alone. (had enough of tech support for one week) I have re provisioned, reset, *82, etc and still have the 50/50 chance. It's annoying because many people will not answer their phone if it says unknown, and this is actually one of the reasons I choose Phone Power over Anveo as Phone power offered Name and Number Incoming and outgoing display, whereas Anveo only offered number display, but if this service doesn't work ½ of the time, I am wondering if I should have signed up with Anveo or another company. This is one error that I will continue to monitor, and hope can get fixed at some point.
4. When you sign up – whatever name you enter at sign up will be your caller ID name. I am used to having First Initial last Name, but with Phone power it will display Last Name First Name – and have your WHOLE name shown. I have not figured out how to only have my first initial shown, and I would hope this is something that would be available in the future.
5. I understand when you pay $5/month you get what you pay for, but my hope would be that Phone Power continues to enhance their customer service experience. I had excellent service from the billing department both on phone and email, but I am not overly impressed with the technical support at this point in time.
Overall I would say to anyone who is thinking about signing up with Phone Power in Canada, it may be simpler to sign up with a new phone number and do not spoof your phone number during sign up. I have not had one dropped call, and the quality is very comparable to a land line. Also they offer Voicemail to email service which is a very nice touch (it emails you a sound file of the whole voicemail) I would still recommend this service even with the issues I have had in the past two weeks. Hope this helped at least one person
- Shawguy
