Talk app gets to receive calls via phone number porting (like Google Voice?)

[WNYmathGuy]

This may be a request fueled by the Dunning–Kruger effect, but here we go...

Google has a service they call Voice, which they strip you off of if you get one of their Project Fi phone accounts. (project fi works by straddling T-Mobile and Sprint networks instead of building new towers) The Voice thing was fun. You got to pick a phone number from all the available options. You could give out that Voice number to people and when somebody called it, you could have the Voice interface to ring at a series of phones that you might be at with clever rules for time and so forth. In hindsight, I see that Google was scraping off a single users work phone, home phone, mobile phone, and so on, plus getting to do speech to text for all your communications in order to better spy on you and sell you to ad companies. Still, it was cool to pick a phone number and have it routed to a PC or another phone as desired.

All this Googlification made it seem like anybody could do anything with phone numbers and routing communication streams. Magic!

I currently have two VoIP phone numbers and I would love to stop paying for one of them. I thought it would be great if I could somehow port one of them to a Nextcloud account of mine so that it would rout the phone calls to my Nextcloud Talk app the way Google used to rout a number through their Hangouts app.

I'm so ignorant about phone switching and so forth that I don't know how stupid that idea is. For all I know, it would require a private VoIP server, and T5 dedicated copper line from AT&T.

I'm guessing this is a no-go idea, but maybe it will be fun for people who do know what they are talking about to say why this is an impossible idea. 😄

[nickvergessen]

Well, in theory that is possible, yes.
But it means you need a SIP gateway and a special contract with your provider so they give you a phone number for it. It is on our long term goal list, but not on our todo for now.

You can find more related issues at https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sip