VoIP.ms is hard to port into and out of, I've repeatedly seen them drop part of the account number when transferring a number, then drag their feet for days thereafter on resubmitting the port.
Always ask for the Port Order Number (PON) so you can follow up with the other carrier to see what they received from VoIP.ms
Google Voice is requiring ID verification now, and porting your phone number out is difficult as they charge an unlock fee and you get to deal with Bandwidth.com's port out shenanigans as they are the real underlying carrier for Google Voice.
What can be open sourced (GrapheneOS) already is, and the remainder is business logic that they have described for the MVNO that is likely carrier specific and tied to the oddball MVNO platform they are using.
Very hard to make the latter usable by anyone else IMO.
Mitigating SIP and TDM spoofing requires broad cooperation among every other Telecom provider. That doesn't exist today, you can't prevent people from spoofing your number.
There is a lot of money floating around major cities in the US. So many nonprofit entities are preserving some cultural niche thanks to their older patrons using their qualified minimum distribution to fund a long lasting endowment.
I feel like you see this less in other parts of the world where people don't have tens of thousands of dollars from their retirement savings that they have to take out each year, and they would rather give it tax free to their favorite nonprofit than take a haircut with taxes and then do nothing with the money
The difference is in other countries the government decides to invest their own citizens' tax revenue in whatever cultural projects they decide, versus in the US where individuals decide for themselves to do it.
Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often.
Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.
The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions
It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).
* using more than one org (needs app restart!) although
screen sharing between 'classic' and 'web' editions works only if sender's and receiver's graphic cards share a hw-accelerated video format blessed by teams. Not, it's not easy to check what edition you are running and you can't change it without poking js variables by hand
* inconsistent read statuses between devices
* 'incoming call not shown at all' bug (but you get a missed call notification)
* can't join two video calls even in two separate windows
* random audio device switching on every morning (even if you don't close the app and computer for the night)
It's fine. Messages sometimes fail to appear unless you navigate away and back and sometimes they fail to appear at all until 30 minutes later but it's fine. This regularly slows down communication and costs company time, but it's fine. It's 2026, classrooms full of children can vibe code a chat app but a $3T company struggles with basic chat functionality. It's fine.
Whatever. I've been using it since day one and its still a broken turd. People are just used to shit software, restarting, rebooting, missing calls, missing messages. Sure you can make it work, but you can't deny its a real piece of shit.
Maybe in 2020. Teams is the defacto IM app for enterprise now. It may not be to your liking, but most workplaces don't need apps to constantly be adding new features. They need videoconferencing, chat, meeting recording and AI transcription and note-taking. All synced with everyone's Outlook calendars and authenticated by the same SSO used org-wide. Teams has had all of those for years.
For the 1000+ headcount companies who sit outside the Silicon Valley webdev/software dev world, it doesn't. Silicon Valley looks at these as "products". Purchasing managers see these as "commodities" that need to be interoperable with the rest of their stack first.
That's fair, in my last org we used Teams for meetings despite Slack for general chat etc.
Partly I'd say that's due to MS giving it subpar experience in O365 calendar/mail/outlook - you can't join a call directly, best you can really do is link to the channel as location.
They're ending webhooks? Bummer. By the looks of it, they're going to introduce a more complex alternative. No, two, because why not. Why make something work when you can also make two things that work half, right?
yeah, it's fine for me - probably as good as an electron app can get (def not good as a true native app but it's def better than having to use my phone...)
