Everything worth knowing before you buy a business phone number.

How we source these pages

Every regulatory claim links to the rule itself — the Code of Federal Regulations, the statute, a Federal Register notice, an IETF or ITU standard — rather than to an article about the rule. Every price links to the vendor's own pricing page and carries the date we checked it. Where we could not verify something, we say so on the page instead of writing around it.

The primary sources most of these pages rest on. Numbers follow ITU-T Recommendation E.164 1 and, in North America, are assigned under the North American Numbering Plan administered by NANPA.2 The federal porting intervals are in 47 CFR § 52.35 3 and were adopted by a 2010 Federal Register notice.4 Direct 911 dialing and on-site notification for multi-line telephone systems are in 47 CFR § 9.16 5 and, for Kari’s Law, in 47 U.S.C. § 623.6 Caller ID authentication (STIR/SHAKEN) is required of US voice providers by 47 CFR § 64.6301.7 For Canada, telecommunications are governed federally by the Telecommunications Act.8 The Canadian regulator’s website blocks automated access, so the CRTC rules on 9-1-1 and porting were read from dated Internet Archive copies of the CRTC’s own pages, and are labelled that way. Serving Canada collects the Canadian points in one place.

We also name the claims we decided not to make. Several widely repeated statements about competitors turned out to be unsupported when we went looking for the source, and the pages say that explicitly, so you can check every comparison yourself.