Please remove requirement to enter a phone# when registering

[nauru]

Currently prospective users visiting freephonline.ca website and attempting to register are faced with a demand for a phone number. But if the person already had a phone they wouldn't need freephoneline. Sure, there are many people who already have a phone service in Canada, but a lot of people don't. Canada has one of the lowest rates of mobile phone penetration in the industrialized world; roughly one third of Canadian adults don't have a mobile phone. Other groups who may not have an alternative phone number include Canadian expatriates returning to Canada after years away from Canada, young people moving into their first home who do not have mobile service, recent immigrants, as well as many other individuals who for a variety of reasons may not have a traditional landline or mobile phone. Furthermore, freephoneline already has a contact point for the new customer: the email address as entered into the initial registration form.

Frustratingly, when one tries to bypass the demand for a phone number by entering a dummy number like 222 222 2222 the registration form will not proceed to the next page and instead returns an error demanding a valid Canadian phone number. This causes some users to erroneously believe that an existing phone service is a requirement for using freephoneline and/or that freephoneline is not advanced enough or reliable enough to be used like a normal phone.

My suggestion is that you remove the phone number field from the main registration page. It should not be part of the registration process and is an unnecessary deterrent to sign-ups. It may also be damaging people's first impressions of freephoneline when visiting the site for the first time and attempting to register (and then being denied access to phone service for no other reason than not already having phone service). Even if you choose to keep a phone number field on the main registration page, it should not be mandatory to enter a phone number. It might be reasonable to make it possible *after* the user has successfully registered, to add an alternative phone number to his or her profile *if* the user so chooses. But I don't think this should ever be mandatory.

[FONGO_steve]

At present time freephoneline is only available for Canadian residents. By using a phone number and callback system we can dramatically cut down on service abuse and also ensure that all registrations remain from Canadian citizens only.

The secondary phone number is also passed through to 911 operators in the event of an emergency so emergency services can contact you back at a secondary number in the event your VoIP is non-operational.

Hopefully this helps with your understanding of why it is so important that we capture a valid phone number upon registration.