Free UK landline phone numbers

Completely non-Monzo related but, I find this interesting and fun to play around with and I thought that some Monzo people over here might be interested too!

What is it
So, there’s a German company called sipgate that, amongst other things, offers free UK based landline phone numbers to individuals and small businesses (you’ve got to top it up with credit if you want to make calls from it but, if you just want to receive calls and play around with their API, that’s free).

I have two (the max you’re allowed per person) which I use for a few things, the one caveat being that, if you want to re-direct it to your mobile you have to top it up, but you can log in with a zip client like zoiper ridiculously easily.

Where can you get it
You can get a number at sipgatebasic.co.uk and their API is at sipgate.io (it’s quite limited on their free service but you can still do some fun things).

If anyone’s interested you can PM me if you get stuck, no referrals or anything I just like their service, I’d love to hear what other people could get up to with these numbers, the most adventurous thing I’ve hooked up so far (disconnected now but, I played around with it for a bit) was home automation through a phone number which was fun.

Something Else
[Sidenote: There’s another provider I know of which also offers 03xx numbers amongst a few other prefixes that sipgate don’t do, for free (and you get 15 free minutes per month!) but they’re a bit more fiddly and don’t have an api - tel2.co.uk - if anyone knows of any other providers, I’d be interested to see them!]

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Literally just my home landline :slight_smile:

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Perfectly good use for it! :stuck_out_tongue: You can actually also connect the number to a normal landline phone through a little sip box, potentially saving money on your landline calls (sipgate offer unlimited for £10/mo) but then you still need an internet connection & line rental and all that guff so there’s not much point.

Cool!

But: for someone with ADSL or VDSL (which I assume is the majority of the population) what do you use this for?

(im really curious: I love playing with that sort of stuff, but just can’t come up with a good use case. Also: why do you have 2?)

I use the vyke mobile equivalent, and I have a couple of numbers, one is for finance stuff the other for general. The finance number is only known to banks, cards etc to prevent mobile hijacks attacks, and the general number goes to everything that is not an actual friend, so amazon, ebay etc.

When my proper mobile number rings, I know it is a real person trying to talk to me.

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Good questions, I probably should have explained but my post was already a bit long :smile:

For me personally, I use a London one for business (I also have an 03 number with tel2 that I use for business) and one local to my home-town so that friends & relatives who use landlines can call me in a way that they’re comfortable & familiar with, also, some of them are charged more to call a mobile number so a landline helps them out a bit.

All of these numbers come straight through to a sip client on my mobile phone (provided I have an internet connection which I usually do or I’ve set up some fancy handling stuff to make sure that people don’t just get bounced) where I can easily answer them no matter where I am :slight_smile:

For the business one I also have some stuff set up through the API so that it can go through to multiple people with as little friction for the caller as possible, we all work from home so we can all have one.

Oooh, I hadn’t seen vyke, looks like what I’m doing but with less manual work and it’s definitely a good idea to split numbers, probably worth doing that myself considering how many I have :joy:

Edit: Oh dear, that reminds me, I’ve also got a US (New York) one through Google Voice…

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I pay for vyke but there is a free equivalent called sudo on iOS.

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I’ve used LocalPhone to do something similar for past 10 years. LocalPhone charge for numbers now (£0.90/month for UK numbers, other countries vary) but i’m grandfathered-in from when they gave out free numbers.

A free account at OnSIP allows me to have hosted SIP on my domain, so people can call me via federated SIP at user@example.org (or use a handy-dandy webpage OnSIP provides to call me via their browser).

On my mobile i use Acrobits Softphone (Android | iOS) because it allows you to enable push notifications to save battery.

I also have a Yealink T23G hardware SIP phone sitting on my desk attached to the same accounts.

When a call comes in on my number it’ll ring both phones simultaneously and i can pick up on whatever device is most handy.

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Very nice set up, I’m planning on buying a hardware voip phone at some point but… still stuck wondering whether it’d be worth it or not considering I’d have my mobile :thinking:

Don’t. If you need a separate number just use a SIP client on your mobile.

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That’s my current set up, got four accounts going into it and it’s working fine for me at the moment.

Aha, unless you have actual fibre not from BT :wink:

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I have this but no use for a landline number in any case :man_shrugging:

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Very good point, I wish I did, no one decent serves my area :frowning:

Fair enough :slight_smile: it’s just useful to me & I only found it by stumbling across it one day, I just wondered whether someone else would find it useful

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I had a landline number with BT for the last 21 years. Last month I ditched BT (Plusnet) and migrated my landline number to Sipgate.

I now have Virgin Media broadband only (no Hyperoptic round my way) and it means I’m no longer paying through the nose for the dinosaur technology that is twisted-pair copper.

Sipgate works well and I retain my landline number that I’ve had for years.

I’ve actually been using Sipgate and Gradwell for a number of years. I also use a client on my iPhone to make/recieve calls with landline numbers.

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It would be great if these services offered UK mobile numbers instead of landlines. I would do similar to the above then and have one for work and one for finance stuff.

Andrews & Arnold can offer you a mobile number for a very cheap monthly price.

Are these mobile numbers then? What sort of monthly price?

What do you class as cheap? And do these integrate with iOS 11 as normal calls?