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Porting your telephone number from Time Warner to Google Voice

Started by tempo150101, March 18, 2015, 07:55:17 PM

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tempo150101

As most people know, you have to first port a landline number to a cell phone before you can port it to Google Voice.

Off and on, I have spent the better part of the afternoon and evening trying to get my longtime home telephone number to port over from Time Warner Cable to T-Mobile. I couldn't find any documentation on this topic, so I thought I would post what I found out here.

To transfer your landline to T-Mobile, you will need to provide the following information:

1. Account Number - Upper right hand corner of your bill, include both the prefix number before the hyphen, and the suffix number after the hyphen);

2. PIN - If you do not have a pin (most people don't), use the last four digits of your social security number;

The next one is the important one, since I used a prepaid account and they weren't very interested in who I am:

3. Name, address, city/state - This is very important; my port request would not go through without this information and it has to be EXACTLY as it appears on your account. Something as minor as spelling out "Street" when your TWC account says "ST" will get your request rejected.

4. Transfer to Google Voice.

So far, I've had this gizmo with Google Voice for about a week and I love it. It does a good job sending and receiving faxes, and dialing **2, 3 and 4 isn't as big of a hassle as I first thought. My only beef is that it doesn't do a good job displaying caller ID. It says "out of area" regardless of who calls. I posted  a separate thread on this issue.

SteveInWA

Google Voice number porting questions are discussed and answered daily on the Google Voice forum, which is where you would have found help to port in your number.

Azrobert also answered your question about caller ID...there are two components to caller ID:  the name, and the number.  The Caller ID number is known to the carriers at each end, and so it's easy for the carrier to display it on the called party's end, as long as it's not blocked.  GV is doing that.

Caller ID NAME (CNAM) is not sent with the call; it's obtained via a database look-up by the called party's phone company.  Since there is a cost associated with maintaining the CNAM databases, Google neither supplies its users names to the DBs, nor pays to "dip" or look up names on inbound calls.  Various analog telephones handle missing CNAM differently.  You may see nothing (a blank field), or some other message displayed, but the number field will always be populated.