Hi all! I’m looking for a service where I can port my phone number, and then make and receive phone calls and SMS, all over data, not cell service. My particular use case is that I live in Germany, but I still have a US phone number, and occasionally need to receive SMSes or phone calls on that number.

I am aware that Google Voice offers this service, but as you can probably guess given that I’m here, I am unwilling to use it :). I saw JMP here: https://lemmy.world/post/1033514, but TBH, I don’t think that it will give me the experience that I’m looking for, given that it seems to translate everything back to generic Jabber.

Edit: Thank you all for the suggestions! I have decided to go with VoIP.ms: I tested it today, and am working on transferring my number to them now.

  • Mike Wooskey@lemmy.d.thewooskeys.comEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    I think Asterisk can do all the functions of Google Voice. I looked into self-hosting Asterisk, but I think it’s beyond my skillset. I think there are services that host Asterisk for you.

    • glue_snorter@lemmy.sdfeu.orgEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      Asterisk is a corporate switchboard product. It’s very very old, although I presume it supports SIP nowadays. But there are other SIP services nowadays.

      SIP is telephony over IP.

      It is massive overkill to self-host, especially to self-host Asterisk. Search for “hosted SIP”.

      I went with Zadarma, but I was choosing mainly on price.