Number porting to GV - my experience
SteveInWA:
T-Mobile is selling (or has already sold) their prepaid business to Ultra Mobile, as far as I've heard. This is causing some confusion over the exact cost for a minimum number of minutes. It's up to you to shop and compare.
It is not sufficient to buy a SIM. You need to have working phone service, so you must buy whatever the minimum amount of calling they offer. For example: if the minimum is now $x per month, then buy that.
What you need: Google Voice does not port in land line numbers. To work around this the "hack" is to port your land line phone number to a mobile service. How you do that doesn't matter from Google's standpoint. But, from a procedural standpoint, you need to end up with the number ported to a mobile carrier, such that you can both make and receive mobile phone calls, and you can send and receive text messages. Porting a land line number into a mobile carrier, or doing the reverse, is more complex than a simple mobile-to-mobile port, and it will take at least 24 hours, and sometimes several days. Wait a full week after you can receive calls on the mobile phone, before subsequently porting into Google Voice.
Do NOT cancel service, under any circumstances, during these two ports, or you will lose the right use the number. The porting process will cancel service for you, on the losing carrier, automatically at the right stage of the process.
DigitalDad:
So should I use UltraMobile instead? It says you buy a "PayGo" at T-mobile retailers, it does say you can transfer your phone number on the FAQ's.
Never Mind.
Just got off the phone with the T-Mobile stores around me and none of them carry it and they gave me the 1-888 # to Ultramobile and they don't sell them online or over the phone. So unless you are near one of the lucky 1500 stores that got PayGo you are out of luck. And T-mobile is telling me their cheapest prepaid service is $40.
So it looks like $7+$40+$20=$67 (SIM+1 Month of Pre-paid Plan + Google Voice Porting Fee) is what it is going to cost me to keep my old home phone number. A lot more than the original $3 I went in to this thinking it would cost.
SteveInWA:
I said "it's up to you to shop and compare", and I meant it. I didn't mean "follow this eight-year-old thread's original directions".
The prepaid industry is moving away from the low-profit pay-per-minute plans, especially the subsidiary brands of the big four mobile carriers.
You could use another prepaid service provider; there is nothing magic about T-Mobile. For example:
https://www.redpocket.com/plans/add/M010
Aside from that, you don't need to limit yourself to Google Voice. There are low-cost alternatives that work fine with OBiTALK devices. Many of us use Callcentric, voip.ms or Anveo.
DigitalDad:
I tried to ask before I bought that pre-paid sim but I'm not dwelling on that but hopefully someone new will see this and make a wiser choice than I. I had read not to buy from smaller outfits as they didn't do porting of numbers well like the larger companies, but maybe that was a very old post, You kind of get lost and confused after reading 23+ pages of the tutorial, I think it's time for a re-write/updated version on a fresh page and stickyed.
But on to better questions, why use something other than Google Voice? What is the benefits of a different service or what are the drawbacks of Google voice?
SteveInWA:
We can't make this discussion thread vanish, so people like you find it and then get sucked into the vortex.
Why use another service? Because you weren't happy about the cost of porting to Google Voice, and you said "never mind". The other services can directly port in land lines with very little fuss, and some of them do it for free.
See: https://www.callcentric.com/did/
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