Number porting to GV - my experience
soundview:
:D I did indeed and it does not work. Not surprising because when you activate a T-mobile prepaid account, you are never asked for your SS#.
Update to previous post: The T-mobile account number for prepaid is 1 plus your phone number. Thus if your phone number is 345-678-9000, your account number is 13456789000. If this is incorrect, please let me know!!
CoalMinerRetired:
Quote from: soundview on November 17, 2012, 06:29:19 am
At this time, the official Obi tutorial is outdated. When you initiate a GV port request, it never asks for the 4 digit pin during the initial process. This guarantees you will get rejected on your first try. So after seeing the first rejection, you now get to enter your 4 digit pin. But wait, there's more! GV also asks for the last 4 digits of your SS# - WTF? I have no stinking SS# on my cheap prepaid but they want it in order to proceed.
I'm not so sure that is correct (bolded part). You get different screens and GV asks for different things based on what carrier you are porting from. For example, porting from T-Mob prepaid it never prompts for your pin, but it does come back a few screens later in the process and say "error, wrong pin/no pin, please provide it here...". This are my observations based on four ports in the past few months, two of my own (both T-Mob), two from the neighbors, one of which was from T-Mob.
soundview:
As CMR pointed out, YMMV. My experience is from two GV port attempts in the past week from prepaid T-mobile. I never saw an error screen for wrong pin / no pin - I use chrome as my browser FWIW. Is it possible I somehow missed the screen?
First indication there is a problem is when clicking the port status link on the google voice home page. If it were not for that link, I would never know there was an error with my GV port.
I am off to activate a new SIM and start over which seems to have worked for prflat. I'll report back here the results.
soundview:
??? Following prflat's previously posted advice, I activated new prepaid sim card and created new T-mobile account. When I called to do a T-mob to T-mob number transfer, I'm told they cannot transfer the phone number associated with my first sim card to the new account on the new sim card until it has been active for 30 days since it is brand new. Even if I had the patience to wait that long, there is not guarantee that the GV port will work from the new account.
So ... I guess I'm stuck having to use a real VOIP provider if I want to keep my old phone number or leaving my old number on a cell for 30+ days ... :'(
I do envy you who had a smooth GV porting experience!
soundview:
;D SUCCESS!!
Being an OCD geek, I kept hammering away at resending my PIN/SSN 2,3,4 times an hour. Then in the chill morning darkness at 5:30 am, I reached for my iPad, reentered my info and to my utter surprise the error rejection message didn't appear. I reloaded the status page and sure enough the rejection message was gone. I breathlessly waited for 24 hours for the port to take place not daring to peek at the status (OK, I peeked) .... only it didn't. GV underwent a widespread technical problem which stalled all port in requests. Another tortuous 32 hours later on the GV support forum, my port was successful.
As I toss all my scribbled notes, SIM cards and other material, here is what you need to know to port from T-mobile prepaid to GV.
Before you even think of doing this, you must be technical and persistent enough to handle things if the *bleep* hits the fan. Be prepared to handle a lot of hassle. If this isn't you, use a paid service instead.
Get your $0.99 SIM cards (order 2 just in case), unlocked GSM phone and make sure they are charged and ready to go. I got a cheapie on ebay for $15.
Start your port when your phone number can be out of action for at least a week or more. Tell your spouse the phone will be temporarily on a cell phone. Get a nice gift for her/him and put it aside for when you may need it.
Your T-Mobile account number is 1 plus your phone number
Make sure you keep clicking the status link on your GV home page. If you see an error, resubmit your info and try again. Keep at it for minutes, hours, days. Think video game.
Enter your 4 digit PIN in both PIN and SSN fields on the GV status form.
If things go south, get on the GV forum and track down _mattman_ who is the only one who knows what's going on. Give the nice gift to your spouse and prepare for hell.
Since ultimately I don't know what made the rejection error go away, I also did the following. Called T-Mobile and had them fill in my full name and address on the billing account for my prepaid. Changed my PIN number from the initial one during activation to a new one. Neither of those things fixed the problem and my gut tells me it was only my persistent clicking that finally broke through. FWIW, I started on Friday, canceled and resubmitted on Saturday and it was early Monday morning when I finally got an error free retry. Good luck and peace out.
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