VoIP FAQ's

Yes. We port landline, 0800 and 0508 numbers from Spark, One NZ, 2degrees and other providers. Porting costs $20 per number and your existing service keeps working right up until the switch, so there is no gap and nothing on your signage, vans or invoices needs reprinting.

Chorus is progressively retiring its copper network, and for a lot of homes and rural businesses that means the old landline is going away whether or not they were ready for it.

A VoIP line replaces it and keeps the same number. It runs over whatever internet you already have — fibre, VDSL, fixed wireless or Starlink. Tell us your address and we will confirm what will work there.

Very little. A single call uses roughly 100 kbps in each direction including overheads, so even a modest connection handles several calls at once. Our residential service needs about 0.417 Mbps.

What matters far more than raw speed is consistency. A stable connection with low jitter gives better call quality than a fast one that fluctuates.

Yes, and we have over 2,500 New Zealand customers running phone lines over Starlink. Starlink gives you plenty of bandwidth and our platform is configured to work with the way it handles connections.

See our Starlink VoIP and Starlink business pages for detail.

Yes. Most Starlink, fixed wireless and some fibre connections put you behind carrier grade NAT, which means you do not have your own public IP address. That upsets some VoIP setups.

Our SIP servers are configured to handle it, and where a handset or router needs a particular setting our support team will sort it with you. You do not need a static or public IP address to use our service.

A phone line over any internet connection will not work in a power cut, because your router and, if you are on Starlink, the dish both need power. An old copper landline sometimes kept working.

If anyone at your address relies on a phone to call 111 for a medical or safety reason, tell us before you sign up. We will talk through the options, which usually means keeping a charged mobile as backup or running the router from a small UPS. This is covered by the 111 Contact Code.

Your registered service address is what emergency services see, so it is important you tell us when you move. Unlike a copper line, a VoIP line can physically be used anywhere there is internet, which is useful day to day but means the address on file is the one that matters in an emergency.

One of three things, depending on how you want to make calls.

• An ATA — a small adapter that lets you keep using your existing cordless or corded phone. Cheapest option and nothing about how you dial changes.
• An IP phone — a handset such as a Yealink that plugs into your router with a network cable. Better call quality and fewer things to go wrong.
• A softphone or app — make and take calls on a computer or mobile with no hardware at all.

Often, yes. Standards-compliant SIP handsets will generally work on our platform. Older analogue phones work with an ATA. Send us the make and model and we will confirm before you commit to anything.

Phones that are locked to another provider sometimes cannot be reconfigured, which is worth checking before you plan around them.

Nine times out of ten it is the router rather than the connection. The most common culprit is SIP ALG, a feature many consumer routers enable by default that tries to be helpful with VoIP traffic and usually breaks it instead. Turning it off fixes a lot of one-way audio and dropped registration problems.

Other causes are aggressive firewall timeouts, an overloaded connection with no quality of service configured, or wifi interference between the handset and the router. Ring us and we will work through it with you.

A cable, whenever you can. Wifi adds jitter and is the single most common cause of call quality complaints that turn out not to be the connection at all. Starlink Gen 3 routers have spare network ports, and most fibre routers do too.

No. Our service works on ordinary dynamic connections, including those behind CGNAT. A static IP is available if you want one for other reasons, but it is not required to make and receive calls.

We support encrypted signalling and media — TLS for the SIP signalling and SRTP for the audio — on equipment that supports it. If your business has privacy or compliance obligations, tell us and we will configure it that way.

Toll fraud is the main security risk with any phone system, and it usually starts with a weak extension password or a handset exposed directly to the internet. We use strong credentials by default and monitor for unusual calling patterns.

If you run your own PBX, keep it patched, use strong passwords on every extension, and restrict international calling to the destinations you actually ring.

Sometimes, but it is not something we would build a plan around. Fax was designed for analogue lines and does not survive compression well. Where it is needed we use T.38, which is a fax-specific protocol rather than treating the fax as audio.

In practice most businesses are better off with an email-to-fax service, and it is usually cheaper too. Ask us if you still have a genuine fax requirement.

This is the question most people forget until the copper is disconnected. Monitored alarms, lift emergency phones, medical alarms and some older EFTPOS terminals were designed for analogue copper lines and do not always work reliably over VoIP.

Tell us what else is plugged into your phone line before we switch anything. Some devices work fine, some need an alternative such as a cellular or IP path, and it is far better to plan that in advance than to discover it afterwards.

No. Every plan we sell is month to month, whether it is phone lines, mobile or internet. Change plan, add lines or leave whenever you need to.

That depends on your plan rather than your internet. We sell concurrent lines, which is how many conversations can happen at the same moment. That is usually a much smaller number than your headcount — a ten person office rarely needs ten lines.

Tell us how busy your phones get and we will size it properly rather than selling you more than you need.

Yes. With a softphone app your staff make and take calls on their own phone and your business number is what the customer sees, so nobody hands out a personal mobile number. That works from home, in the van or on site.

Yes, and this is one of the real advantages over a copper line. Your number is not tied to an exchange or an address, so it moves with you. Just tell us when you move so we can update the address held for 111 calls.

No. Prices across our website exclude GST unless we say otherwise, in line with the rest of our business pricing. All prices are in New Zealand dollars.

We do. A person answers in about 13 seconds on average, measured on our own 3CX system across the support team in 2026. No IVR maze and no offshore call centre. Phones are open Monday to Friday, 7am to 6pm.

You can also log a support ticket for anything that can wait.