What is a virtual phone number

From Virtual-Phone-Number

A virtual phone number is a phone number which does not ring at a specific geographic location. In the first days pf telephony, phone numbers and geographic location were closely interrelated. In fact, in a mechanical switch each digit selected a specific wire, all the way to the subscriber being called. Then came digital switches, where the association was much looser. You still had a block of numbers associated with each switch, but you could have many numbers for one line, or conversely, many lines sharing one number. With Intelligent Networks, the concept of non-geographic numbers appeared. These are numbers that do not have a geographic association at all. For instance, one number may ring in New York, Chicago or Bangalore, depending on the time of day, day of week, network load, etc.

With the advent of mobile phones, all relation between a phone number and geography was lost. Most mobile companies in the US offer their subscribers a wide choice of phone numbers, including virtually any area code. Then VOIP came along. Now a subscriber can have a phone number from any city, and he can also take the number with him to any country in the world.

In the last couple of years a few companies begun offering pure virtual phone numbers. These are phone numbers that are diverted to another phone number anywhere in the world. The little remaining geographic link was finally cut.

A few companies are providing virtual phone numbers in different countries. In the directory section you can find a list of suppliers. Some of these companies provide virtual phone numbers from tens of countries, others just from one. Depending on the company, the incoming calls may ring in one or more of the following:

   * a regular phone line
   * a mobile phone
   * a VOIP adapter
   * an Asterisk box
   * a Cisco Call Manager
   * a Skype softphone or device
   * a Google Talk (GTalk) softphone
   * etc