It looks like the porting of my Skype number is proceeding well. I just got this notice from voip.ms along with additional info about going ahead and setting it up in my dashboard:
FOC Date: 2025-03-20 (yyyy-mm-dd)
Description: Your port will likely complete on this date. Firm Order Confirmation (FOC) is the finalized date for your number to be transferred. The carrier that is releasing the number issues this date. We will email you again regarding the completion of your number.
Here’s my referral link in case anybody else wants to move their Skype number to voip.ms. Using this link we both get some credits.
And… my Skype number successfully ported! SMS will take another 24-48 hrs to be provisioned, but calls in and out, and voicemail (received by email) is working just fine.
The call rate for incoming calls is $0.009 per minute and for outgoing calls $0.01 per minute. They do it in fractions of a minute, so, for example, you can see for an 18 second outgoing call I made the cost was just $0.003.
Since the porting in is free, and the maintenance cost of the number is just $0.85/month, it is actually less expensive to maintain my Skype number this way (for my use case) than the Skype in subscription cost of $30/year.
Of course if you spend hours on the phone each day your costs will vary.
If you want to port in your Skype number though so as not to lose it, this seems like a nice solution. While the voip.ms settings are not for the fainthearted, they do have 24 hour live chat support that has been very helpful.
You have a choice of softphone apps to use. I am using Groundwire, which many people recommended, and which has just a one-time $9.99 cost. There are free softphone apps as well.
Belated thanks, @jzw. I start to investigate options, including your suggested Talkatome, and share results here if I find anything not already reported (this is a highly active and helpful forum so it’s unlikely I’ll find anything new!)
Greetings all! I won’t get into the “better-worse” discussion, as I’m not that smart. But I do have a challenge that I’d appreciate some assistance.
I have been using Teams for work; my company email is my username. So far, so good. When the “updated Skype” was pushed to my iPhone, all of a sudden, both my Skype and Teams apps showed my personal messages from Skype mixed in with my business Teams messages. Earlier this week, I tried to log into my Teams account on my iPhone with my company email address, and I got all sorts of warnings (“multiple attempts to log in… account suspended…”). My iPhone Teams is now toast until I find a solution.
I’ve looked and haven’t found any guidance, so I’m probably overlooking something obvious. Any advice would be most appreciated.
Teams should allow you to be signed into multiple accounts and to switch between them on the fly. You can add/switch accounts on an iPhone by pressing on the profile icon in the upper left corner of the Teams app.
A specific solution depends on exactly how your business Teams account is set up. If your business has an IT support desk, I strongly recommend contacting them. If you are the IT support desk, and your business teams account is set up using one of the business versions of Microsoft 365 or a paid Teams business subscription, you probably need to go to the admin portal on the web and unlock the Teams account and perhaps remove and then re-associate the iPhone with your business Microsoft account. You also can contact Microsoft tech support if you own the business account. They’re usually pretty good, but they can be slow getting back to support requests from small operations.
I wish I could give you a simpler, more direct solution, but Teams is complex enough that it can be difficult, especially given the wide range of deployment options for businesses.
I just wanted to mention that I did successfully port my Skype number into VoIP.ms and am using that number (plus a nice St. Louis number I got from them) in the Groundwire softphone app.
Phone calls out and in work. As do messages. And voicemail recordings are sent to be automatically via email.
It’s a reasonable alternative. Number porting is free. And maintaining the number is just $0.85/month. VoIP.ms is not for the faint-hearted, but they do have helpful 24 hour chat support and they can help step you through the huge number of settings.
Here are the details of what I did to keep my Skype number (and info if you just need a U.S. number and don’t necessarily want to port a Skype number)…
Interestingly, I requested a copy of my file and chat history from Skype. They provided the download as a .tar file. Seems an odd choice for Microsoft, honestly. Unless Windows can handle .tar files natively?
Windows 11 natively supports tar files, both graphically and on the Windows command-line.
Early versions of Windows 10 didn’t include tar support, but support for the tar command-line was added in 2018. If you try to open/extract a tar file using the graphical interface on a Win10 system, the system will ask if you want to search for a suitable utility in the MS App Store if you don’t have one already installed.
That’s cool - I didn’t realize that MS had finally added .tar as a supported format. I didn’t get .tar files very often when I was working primarily in Windows, so I never really investigated.
