Porting my Home Phone Number

[Mehndi]

Is it possible to port my home telephone number without first porting to a cell phone and then porting that cell number to Google Voice?  It just seems to be a convoluted way to do something simple-- which is to keep my current home phone number.

[lhm.]

No.

[Lavarock7]

Unfortunately, even after porting a home phone number to a cell and then trying to port toGoogleVoice, you may still not be able to do it. Some people report that Google just refuses to get the port for some reason.

If you wish to retain your home number, you could port it to a VOIP service such as Broadvoice or VOIP.MS or one of the many others. There would be a charge of some sort and you may have to pay per call, inbound or outbound. That still may be significantly less than you are currently paying.

Googlevoice will not allow you to fake an outbound caller id, however, some of the other Voip providers do. That may or may not help you, but I thought I would pass it along just in case.

[carl]

VOIP providers like Localphone, Callcentric or Anveo will port your number for 20-25$. Some of them will provide inexpensoive DIDs with free incoming phone calls. You can use them for outgoing calls when it is important that your "proper " caller ID shows up and use GV for the rest.

[JohnBowler]

Number portability seems to be an illusion.  I tried to port my original provider number in a variety of ways and was unable to do so.

I gave up.

Of course, I had paid $1.25/month for many years to be able to do this, but I can't, yet I listen to NPR radio shows whining about corruption in China when my fellow Americans can't see CORRUPTION when it ****s in their face.

Oh well; I get upset about these things because I've been ****ed and there is nothing I can do about it, apart, of course, from rant.

John Bowler <jbowler@acm.org>

[Lavarock7]

Number portability seems to be an illusion.  I tried to port my original provider number in a variety of ways and was unable to do so.

I gave up.

Of course, I had paid $1.25/month for many years to be able to do this, but I can't

Do I smell "class action suit" against the phone company?

Wikipedia says: "The U.S. FCC since has mandated Wireless Local Number Portability starting November 24, 2003 (in metropolitan areas), and allowed operators to charge an additional monthly Long-Term Telephone Number Portability End-Use Charge as compensation. On November 10, 2003, the FCC additionally ruled that number portability applies to landline numbers moving to mobile telephones and, on October 31, 2007, the FCC made clear that the obligation to provide LNP extends to VoIP providers."

I have not look up the FCC ruling, but it appears the FCC said they HAVE to perform LNP and they get money to offset the loss of revenue and/or the cost to upgrade equipment to support it.

If you are paying a fee for service that you have not received, complain to the FCC and sue the phone company for return of the monies paid.

Of course you may find that this is not a fee, but a tax.

[Trev]

One thing that perhaps you didn't keep in mind about local number portability is the local part.  It's not universal number portability.

The new carrier that you want to port your number to must interconnect with the rate center your number belongs to.  If you are in a smaller area, your choices are much more limited because the VoIP carriers haven't yet invested to install the necessary equipment.

The requirements for LNP only require them to port numbers that are within their service area.  They are not forced to install equipment in a new city just because one customer wants to use their service.

[tseward]

I just had luck porting my local number I followed this process here http://www.zdnet.com/blog/diy-it/diy-it-project-guide/373 The only difference is I used Tracfone. Although I would not use them again. They have terrible service.  The biggest Issue I had with them is that they think everything being ported to them is already a wireless number.  So make sure you let them know you are porting an AT+T number.  After three attempts that finally worked.  Essentially as I suspect the process they use requests as a standard ATT wireless but once I got to speak to a manager the process went through smoothly. 

Once the number is live then request and port your number using Google.  That only took 24 hours.  The whole process took about 4 days once I got tracfone to listen. The cost was 19 for the phone, 14 for the minutes, 20 for the google transfer, 60 for the obhi202.  For Free calling = priceless!

Good luck

[jimates]

You can port to Tracfone online. I ported 2 landline numbers to Tracfone without a problem. But still could not port to google voice.

Tracfone's come with 10 minutes of airtime, you didn't need to purchase additional minutes.

Where did you get the Obi202 for $60?

[tseward]

I got lucky and found one on Ebay from someone who did not like the complexity of getting started and poor documentation.  Which by the way I agree the documentation for using, configuring, and getting the most out of the tool is significantly lacking.

[Dave123]

I just had luck porting my local number I followed this process here http://www.zdnet.com/blog/diy-it/diy-it-project-guide/373 The only difference is I used Tracfone. Although I would not use them again. They have terrible service.  The biggest Issue I had with them is that they think everything being ported to them is already a wireless number.  So make sure you let them know you are porting an AT+T number.  After three attempts that finally worked.  Essentially as I suspect the process they use requests as a standard ATT wireless but once I got to speak to a manager the process went through smoothly. 

Once the number is live then request and port your number using Google.  That only took 24 hours.  The whole process took about 4 days once I got tracfone to listen. The cost was 19 for the phone, 14 for the minutes, 20 for the google transfer, 60 for the obhi202.  For Free calling = priceless!

Good luck

The link to the process does not work anymore.  I have the obi100.  How do I port my AT&T landline number to the obi100?  TIA

[lhm.]

Go here. http://www.obitalk.com/forum/index.php?topic=1051.0

[CoalMinerRetired]

The link to the process does not work anymore.  I have the obi100.  How do I port my AT&T landline number to the obi100?  TIA

You do not port a number to the Obi device. You port a number to a "VoIP Provider" and then configure the Obi to use the VoIP provider. Here is the write up on porting to Google Voice, a sort of hybrid VoIP provider: Number porting to GV - my experience