Porting and old provider

ppshay

We changed a business telephone service from BT to Digiweb yesterday. I take that the porting process carried out by Digiweb includes the cancellation of the BT service automatically and we don't need to cancel with BT ourselves?

Xantia

It should do but you may have lines from BT that Digiweb do not know about?
Check your bills when they arrive and clarify from your contact at Digiweb

ppshay

Thanks. It's two PRAs.

Xantia

That should be fine then as long as they have brought in the DDI numbers.
You will need your PBX tech to do the changeover if they have supplied different interface equipment.
Also if you have odd analogue lines about the place for an alarm, franking machine they will still be with BT

Mr. G

As Xantia said, do check to see if there are other lines you don't know about.

It's important you do not cancel the lines with BT, as doing so may lose your lines. Digiweb take care of that.

Do make Digiweb aware of the DDI numbers just in case.

All in all it should take 2 weeks to complete.

ppshay

They have said that we must handle the cancellation with BT. To be honest, it's been a long drawn-out process, but that's another story.

Xantia

The new provider should be interfacing with the old provider to give you the customer a smooth changeover.
You as the customer should be getting the new provider to do most of the work on this, they are after all going to get your business.

Ideally the new provider should already have at least 1 PRA installed, your telecomms tech should have it interfaced to your PBX on to a spare slot, and you should have a test code to dial out on that new PRA with a range of temporary numbers on it.
The DDI also needs to be tested and the quality of service.
You would need to make outbound calls to mobiles and so on to test CLI and voice quality.
Also if you are for example a German company then calls should be made to Germany on the new circuit to ensure correct presentation incoming and outgoing.
You will need info from the tech regarding the presentation of the circuit from the old provider namely is CRC4 on or off on the circuits and how many digits are being received by the PBX on incoming calls, that info will have to be passed to the new provider.

In other words the more prep work you can get done beforehand the less headaches after the fact.

Mr. G

Whatever you do, don't cancel those lines until the port goes through. Though that should have been done for you