B2B VoIP France — Geographic DID & SIP Trunking

What "the French direction" actually means

Most companies that come to us for France are not French. They run a sales floor in Warsaw, a support desk in Lisbon, a dispatch operation somewhere outside the EU entirely — and they need to be reachable on a French number, calling French customers, with the call quality and caller ID that a French recipient will actually pick up. That is the French direction: French numbers, French routes, presence on the French network, without a French legal entity behind it.

Two things have to be true

You need the numbers and the routes — the wholesale infrastructure side, the part that looks like a carrier. And you need someone to set it up, wire it into your PBX, watch the routes, and rotate a number when it starts picking up spam labels — the service side, the part that looks like an in-house voice engineer. Buy those two things separately and you are managing a carrier contract and an integration project at the same time. We hold both.

Said plainly

The numbers come through Tier-1 carrier relationships; the engineering, monitoring, and support come from us, under one agreement. You are not renting seats. You are not getting an API and a documentation portal. You are getting French voice infrastructure with an operations team attached to it.

ARCEP and the French numbering plan

France's telecom regulator is ARCEP — the Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques, des postes et de la distribution de la presse. It runs the Plan national de numérotation, and the structure matters more than usual here, because France does not work the way Germany or the UK do. French geographic numbers are organised by zone, not by city.

Zone	Leading pair	Region
Île-de-France	01	The Paris region.
Northwest	02	Brittany, Normandy, Pays de la Loire, Centre-Val de Loire.
Northeast	03	Hauts-de-France, Grand Est, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.
Southeast	04	Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, PACA, Corsica.
Southwest	05	Nouvelle-Aquitaine and the Atlantic south.

Inside a zone, the digits that follow used to pin a number to a town — 04 91 reads as Marseille, 04 72 as Lyon, and a buyer who knows the country still hears them that way. But that mapping has loosened. ARCEP now allocates polyvalent blocks like 04 81 that sit inside a zone without belonging to any one city, and number portability means a Paris 01 number can follow a company that moved to Marseille years ago. So when someone asks for "a Lyon number," what they usually want is a 04 that reads as the Southeast and carries a recognisable Lyon root — and that is what we provision. Worth being precise about this, because a vendor who promises a strict city code in France is promising something the numbering plan stopped guaranteeing.

The rest of the plan, briefly: 09 carries non-geographic and VoIP-style numbers; 06 and 07 are mobile; 08 covers special and value-added ranges; 080x is freephone. Mobile DID (06/07) is orderable through us at the same price as geographic, on a slightly longer timeline — but for a business presence, geographic is the standard, and that is what most of this page assumes.

CLI, MAN, and why the authentication rules work in your favour

France has had a caller-ID authentication regime live since 25 July 2023. It is called the MAN — Mécanisme d'Authentification des Numéros — the French implementation of STIR/SHAKEN, built on the same certificate-chain idea used in the US and Canada, with French administrative specifics. Its legal basis is the loi n° 2020-901, the loi Naegelen against fraudulent calls, and it covers both fixed and mobile French numbers. Certificates are issued through the APNF.

It filters the spoofers, not you

The MAN exists to break number spoofing: someone presenting a French caller ID they have no right to use. The whole mechanism is a chain of trust that lets one operator verify another operator legitimately allocated the calling number. When the number is genuinely yours, that chain confirms it and the call goes through authenticated. When it is spoofed, the chain has nothing to sign and the call gets flagged or dropped. We issue real DID numbers and we do not spoof CLI — we route caller ID only for numbers a customer bought through us or ported in with verification.

The newer rule points the same way

ARCEP's Décision n° 2025-2215, in force since 1 January 2026, strengthens the framework and now requires operators to define, by contract, the list of numbers each client is allowed to present — and to technically enforce that list. Most providers will have to build that. We already work this way: verified allocation per customer is how the anti-fraud architecture was designed in the first place. A related extension covering Saint-Martin is deferred to 1 January 2028. So a rule that adds friction elsewhere in the market lands, for us, as confirmation of the existing model.

Before the number goes live: anti-fraud and spam handling

The compliance work happens before provisioning, not after something goes wrong. When you submit a number or a CLI, it goes through a review first — KYC at the token level, a check that the use case matches the traffic — and only then does the number get allocated and routed. That ordering is deliberate. Catching a mismatch after the calls have gone out is how a number's reputation gets damaged in the first place.

Spam scoring is the other half

French numbers, like numbers anywhere running volume, will occasionally start picking up spam labels at the carrier level — it happens, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What matters is what happens next. We monitor number reputation, and when one starts to degrade we rotate the pool: the affected numbers come out, fresh ones go in.

Routine, not a fire drill

Because the swap is token-based it needs no new paperwork from you and does not touch any other customer's numbers. It is the same proactive rotation model we run on other directions — roughly the cadence of a number pool turning over a couple of times a month when traffic warrants it. The point is that it is handled as routine maintenance, not as a fire drill you find out about from your answer rates.

Getting a French number live

Three different clocks run here, and they are worth keeping separate because vendors love to blur them.

Platform onboarding — about 24 hours
The first-time KYC and business-case review. That is account activation, not a number.
First French geographic number — three business days
Once you are onboarded, the first French geographic number provisions in three business days; a mobile number on the same terms takes about seven.
Re-orders — hours, no repeat KYC
After that first order, you are in the stock model: re-ordering a French number is a five-minute form and, in most cases, an hour to a few hours to delivery, occasionally up to a business day if a pool needs replenishing. The token already carries your verified profile.

The first-number timeline is mostly the regulator's clock, not ours — that is true for any serious provider. Where the difference shows up is the re-order. For a company scaling French presence number by number, the gap between "hours, no paperwork" and "another procurement cycle every time" is the part you feel month after month.

What a French number costs

Pricing on the French direction is the same for geographic and mobile numbers — the only thing that changes is the provisioning timeline. For a French geographic DID:

Setup

Geographic DID setup

$15, one time.

Monthly

Geographic DID monthly

$15 per month, billed 1/1.

Inbound

Inbound termination

$0.025 per minute.

Outbound

Outbound, single rate

$0.0462 per minute — a single rate, not split between landline and mobile destinations.

A mobile DID runs at the same prices, with the seven-day provisioning timeline instead of three. What is not on that list is as important as what is. Setup, integration, PBX configuration, ongoing engineering, the compliance review at submission, and 24/7 monitoring are included — there is no separate line item for them and no hourly support fee. You are paying wholesale-grade rates for the numbers and the minutes, and the operations work rides along with the contract.

Two operations on the French direction

Two different companies, two different kinds of traffic. The reason both work is the same: the calls originate from real, properly allocated French numbers on routes that someone is actually watching.

70.49%

Cold outbound — answer-seizure ratio

An international company running cold B2B outbound into France: French recipients were not picking up. The fix was structural — real French geographic numbers, clean routing, caller ID that authenticates under the MAN instead of looking like one more spoofed call. ASR settled at 70.49%, genuinely strong for cold outbound. PDD 1.75 seconds; average call around 36 seconds, consistent with cold contact.

66%

Inbound support — answer-seizure ratio

A separate company — inbound rather than outbound — needed a French support line French customers would reach and stay on. After moving onto VoipTower's French numbers and routes, ASR settled around 66% with PDD at 1.30 seconds — even lower than the outbound case, which fits, because inbound paths are simpler. Average call duration about two minutes nine seconds: the shape of a support call, not a routing artefact.

The ASR is the headline, but the PDD is the part an engineer reads first. Low PDD on cold traffic means the path is direct — that is the thing you cannot fake with a better script. These are two different companies, on two different kinds of traffic; what they share is that someone is watching the routes.

Who else serves this market

The French B2B voice market is well-served, and the established names are good at what they do. They are built for a different shape of customer — the honest framing is category fit, not superiority.

Carrier-cloud

OVHcloud Télécom

French cloud and telecom infrastructure with SIP trunk and number products. Strong for companies already inside the OVHcloud ecosystem and comfortable self-configuring. The further you get from that ecosystem, the more the integration and operations work falls back on you.

Enterprise incumbent

Orange Business

The enterprise arm of the French incumbent — carrier-grade scale, trusted at the largest end, full managed offerings. The cost is procurement: weeks to months, longer contracts, change requests that move at committee speed. Built for large French enterprises, not for a fast-moving international operation scaling number by number.

Business telephony

Bouygues Telecom Entreprises

French business telephony and cloud PBX (the former Keyyo now sits inside Bouygues Telecom Entreprises). Clean for a France-based office with fixed headcount and a French legal entity. It is built around French-domestic business customers rather than international operations routing to France without a local entity.

VoipTower sits in a gap those three do not fill the same way: wholesale-grade French voice operations on a managed contract, for international companies with real volume and no in-house voice engineering team. Not better than OVHcloud, Orange, or Bouygues — built for a different shape of operation, on purpose.

Integration and the people on the other end of the chat

On the technical side, the French numbers terminate into whatever you already run. The platform is tested against the common PBXs — 3CX, Asterisk, FreePBX, FreeSWITCH — and connects either IP-to-IP or with SIP credentials, whichever fits your setup. Custom CRM integration is handled through auto-dialers, or via API where a dedicated SIP path exists. You are not rebuilding your stack to take French numbers; the numbers come to your stack.

One channel

A group chat, not a ticket queue

Instead of a ticket queue, we open a dedicated group chat in whatever messenger your team already uses — Telegram, Teams, WhatsApp — with the people who can actually act in it: a support engineer for routing and PBX, an account manager for changes and escalations, a finance contact for billing.

In practice

Fixed live, not queued

A "no outbound lines available" report gets looked at live and fixed in minutes rather than sitting in a queue; a permissions change in 3CX gets configured and screenshotted back to you; a spam-scoring advisory arrives before you have noticed the answer rates slipping.

No runaround

The whole function in one place

No department transfers, no ticket numbers, no chasing the same problem across four systems. Technical, commercial, and financial questions are answered in the same channel by the person who handles each thing.

Questions companies ask about French numbers

Five common questions from companies setting up voice on the French direction, including two in French for native search intent.

Puis-je obtenir un numéro géographique français sans société française ?

Yes. A French geographic DID does not require a French company, a French address, or a French director. Standard onboarding KYC at order time — legal name, registration number, registration country (any country), website, business contact, registered address (any country), use case — is sufficient. International companies order and run French numbers on exactly this basis.

Mes appels sortants seront-ils bloqués par l'authentification des numéros (MAN) ?

No. The MAN targets spoofed caller ID — numbers presented by someone with no right to them. The numbers we provision are legitimately allocated to you, and we route CLI only for numbers bought through us or verified as ported in, so your calls authenticate normally. The regime filters fraudulent traffic; legitimate French numbers pass through it.

How fast can we get a French number, and then more of them?

First French geographic number: three business days after platform onboarding (which is about 24 hours on its own). Mobile: seven business days. After that first order, re-orders in France run off pre-allocated stock — a five-minute form and typically an hour to a few hours to delivery, with no repeat KYC.

Which codecs are supported?

G.711 (a-law and μ-law) and G.729.

Do you bill in euros?

Billing is in USD. Invoices are issued on request with the fields you specify, and payment is flexible — wire transfer, cryptocurrency (USDT on TRON), or other methods by arrangement. The billing detail settles during onboarding alongside everything else.

For SIP, DID, and PBX integration in technical depth, see the services pages. For the full country list, the coverage hub. Pricing logic and the wider model are on the homepage, and onboarding starts at legal.voiptower.company.

Other priority countries

Many businesses use French numbers as part of a wider international voice setup. VoipTower covers 25+ countries — with dedicated priority coverage in other markets used by call centers, sales teams, e-commerce, and logistics operations. France numbers and the rest sit behind the same KYC token, the same support chat, the same engineering team.

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