We don't officially support Outgoing Name. The vast majority of our carrier partners including our primary do not support it at all at this time. In the past we've tried to accommodate some users by moving them around to other carrier partners that do but that's hit or miss as well so our official stance now is that we just don't offer it.

The problem is that VoIP providers have no access to put names in the databases.

The only company that can put a name in or update a name is the underlying provider of the number (for us that'd be our CLEC partners). No one else has any ability to do so.

With a landline company or a cell phone company, they are the underlying provider as well so they can put the names in directly. With VoIP providers we can only get a name in there if the underlying provider will put it there.

Some of our providers offer it, most don't, and some do at a steep price.

Level3 is an example of a provider that will offer it if you push hard enough but they make it so expensive that it's not compatible with a budget VoIP model. They will only offer it the phone number is a special type of number...what they refer to as "Enhanced" which basically is an expensive bundle of things where you not only get the number, but also E911, local calling, etc from them. Typical number costs are about $0.20. These ELS numbers run several dollars and we can't even use the bundled features since we use third-party E911, etc. In addition, they're address restricted and we have to provide them a "service address" for the number in the local ratecenter of the number. Basically it's a lot of hoops to jump though and very expensive. I think the stance is they don't want to offer it but make it available so that if someone reallllly has to have it, they will pay a steep price for it.

Another one of our carriers will do it, but they charge $15 one-time and $1.50 per month. Again that's not something compatible with budget VoIP.

Our primary carrier Bandwidth.com has been promising that this would be coming soon. We migrated thousands of numbers from Level3 to their new CLEC this year. The only thing holding them up I'm told is just the administrative side. They are waiting to put together the software and processes to handle the updates. They claimed it would be here this year, but it's not yet. We do not they are working on it, but when they will have it in place is anyone's best guess.

Bottom line, only the actual carrier can do it and most are not cooperative at this point.