GV Porting Question

[azrobert]

My neighbor mostly uses her cell phone and is thinking of dropping her landline, but is hesitating because she has had this number for many years. I suggested porting her number to GV, but I have a question. The recommended way is to get a pay-as-you-go T-Mobile account, port the landline number to T-Mobile and then port T-Mobile to GV. Now it looks like T-Mobile doesn't offer the pay-as-you-go accounts and only has monthly accounts. Is there another cheap method to port a number to GV? The other option is to port to an SIP VOIP provider and pay a few dollars a month.

[lhm.]

How about Ringto? Free I'm told.

[SteveInWA]

My neighbor mostly uses her cell phone and is thinking of dropping her landline, but is hesitating because she has had this number for many years. I suggested porting her number to GV, but I have a question. The recommended way is to get a pay-as-you-go T-Mobile account, port the landline number to T-Mobile and then port T-Mobile to GV. Now it looks like T-Mobile doesn't offer the pay-as-you-go accounts and only has monthly accounts. Is there another cheap method to port a number to GV? The other option is to port to an SIP VOIP provider and pay a few dollars a month.

There is no official procedure for this, but it can be any mobile carrier, no reason to limit it to T-Mobile.  We see the most successful results using AT&T GoPhone.  Recently, a few people have had issues with GoPhone ports, but it appears to just be the usual cause -- incorrect account number and PIN data submitted.  For GoPhone, the necessary account number isn't displayed anywhere visible to the user/customer.  You must call GoPhone customer care and specifically ask for the account number to be used for porting out.  The PIN is the PIN used to access the GoPhone account's details on their customer web portal, and is not necessarily the same as the voicemail PIN.

Disclaimers:  there's no guarantee that this will work, and you won't know for sure, until after porting the landline to GoPhone, waiting at least a few days for the carrier databases to be updated, and then checking for porting availability on this page:

https://www.google.com/voice/porting

[azrobert]

Thanks Steve