hope this can help someone, because i could not this find this info easily for getting free of ooma and migrating to google voice.
i have a grandfathered ooma and ported my ooma number to a google voice account and my new obi202
how to port ooma number to tmobile
- get a tmobile (or at&t, etc) sim card. saw a current promo to get a 99 cent t-mobile sim card (via mail). you can get a $5 one at best buy. normally they sell for $10-15 without promo it seems.
- used an old verizon samsung s5 cell phone and the new tmobile sim card to give tmobile a destination phone to port my ooma number to
- i called t-mobile to start the port from ooma (tmobile porting hotline: 877-789-3106). it took the activation people at tmobile (very nice and quick to pick up the phone) about three tries to do it over 3 business days of me bugging them. but the account people there are familiar with ooma holding the number and not providing the right info. on the first port attempt, they'll take your ooma "account number" (phone number with or without leading 1) and password (from
my.ooma.com) and possibly your service address. that'll probably fail due to the address being not your account address, but the address to onvoy, inc or some other telco holding company. the second time, they'll try again with more information (social security number) to prove that the port is legit. and the third time it escalates, a specialist at tmobile calls their counterpart at ooma, matches up info, and finalizes the port. the rep assured me that this final third escalation always worked as they were used to dealing with ooma after years of failed porting attempts. when the port finalized, i got a text from tmobile saying "welcome to t-mobile!"
- in the meantime, i never actually paid for minutes on the cell phone with the tmobile sim card in it. you could pay $3 to get 30 minutes of voice prepaid and that way you don't miss anyone calling if you're worried about that. but i just held off and immediately started the google voice porting when i saw t-mobile went through. in the meantime, it seemed like ooma was still receiving calls and allowing me to make them. that'll probably end soon though once ooma systems catch up.
- in order for google voice to port the number from tmobile, you need
a. $20 payment to google voice
b. your number you want to port (my original ooma number)
c. you need to set up a tmobile (online) account with the following info that google voice will need to find you: a four digit pin (i used my last four of my social security to keep things easy), an address, and your name. all spelling, etc. must match up to have a smooth port. you must give tmobile a pin to use either online or on the phone at some point, or else google voice port may not work.
d. google voice will attempt to port on a first try with just the phone number. then in about 10 minutes, the google voice notifications will give you an error message, requiring your password (your four digit tmobile pin) and your last four of your social security. it took me a little while to figure out gv was not asking for my tmobile online account password, but a pin. a note: due to a bug in google voice activations, there may be no place for you to enter requested pin at first. to enter the pin, i had to log out of my voice account, clear history for that whole day, and re login. then the error notification (usually at the top of google voice on desktop) refreshed to show me a new space to enter the pin and social security last four digits. as i had never given my soc to t-mobile, i'm guessing just the pin has to be perfectly correct.
e. once that's all given to google voice, the message at the top of google voice no longer had a red error notification but a notice saying they will finish processing in 24 hours. and it took 22 hours for me.
obi202 now set up properly after about 4 business days of work. the longest, annoying part was getting the port from ooma to tmobile. i didn't feel the need to pay for tmobile service as ooma was still functioning through most of it. and once tmobile got the number, google voice only took 22 hours. total cost: $0.99 for a sim card and $20 to google voice to port. if you don't have a mobile phone handy, you can probably buy a throwaway one or borrow someone's for a few days.
