Forwarding a Canadian phone number

I use Vonage Canada; a VoIP phone for $15 per month. It’s my home phone as well. I connect the small Vonage box to the WIFI router in my DR home or wherever I travel. Then plug any regular phone into the Vonage box. (I bring that too). This allows me to make and receive calls as if I was in Canada. Forward my Canada mobile phone calls to this Vonage line.  No long distance charges. Make sure to get a call forward plan from your carrier for a few dollars or there can be incremental charges they don’t tell you about until you see the bill! Same quality. Vonage also has a free mobile app that allows you to receive calls. It simultaneously rings on the land line and mobile. Voice messages are emailed to you which is bonus. To make outgoing calls to Canada or elsewhere outside DR, I use the Vonage land line.

Hmmmm... that’s really interesting.  Thanks for the tip.  I’ll check that out

We use OpenPhone. $10 a month.

RockyM wrote:

We use OpenPhone. $10 a month.

As Dave said, we use OpenPhone, and have since July. We have the OpenPhone app on our phones to accept texts and phone calls to our US number. Our friends and family in the US don't have to worry about long distance charges or updating their address books! We also use it to dial out to US numbers, including toll-free numbers that you can't reach using a non-US number. It's great for two-factor authentication that requires a US number. You can also access the account on your laptop if you want.

I checked and they do work with Canadian numbers as well. One of the best things is that they will give you a temp phone number for a free trial so that you can test out how well it works.

We ported our phone numbers from AT&T and that was a bit of a struggle (nothing to do with OpenPhone - weird unbundling issue/account number change), but we've been very happy with it!

https://www.openphone.co/

Skype also works wonders--and you can set the Skype app to show that your Canadian number is the one making the calls, so no one knows you're calling from Skype and not using your carrier.

AlaPlaya wrote:

Skype also works wonders--and you can set the Skype app to show that your Canadian number is the one making the calls, so no one knows you're calling from Skype and not using your carrier.

With Skype, can you keep your existing number or do you have to use one they assign?

You pick a number with Skype, and then you set call forwarding on your phone settings to send the call to the Skype number. In the Skype settings, you set the Skype number to display your caller ID as your carrier (AT&T/Bell/Telus) number.

The subscription for unlimited minutes to Canadian mobile and landlines is ~$4/month, and unlimited minutes to US mobile and landlines is ~$3.50/month. For an unlimited North America mobile and landline subscription (which includes US territories, and Mexico) is ~$8/month. A global unlimited subscription is ~$16/month.

It's a running joke with my friends is that the only way they can tell I'm not using the AT&T network is because my reception is significantly better when it's routed through Skype.