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Cellphone Number Portability -- A Big Lie?
juuri asks: "Having spoken to a few friends it seems like troubles with cell phone portability here in the States is rampant. However today I ran into a new problem, it seems numbers aren't really portable if you move. For example if one has an LA number and moves to a different region (which vary greatly from carrier to carrier) you can not move your number with you if you switch to a new carrier such as Cingular or T-Mobile. Why not? You obviously already have the number and with nationwide roaming plans there is no reason for such distinctions. Even more alarming is that your new regional arm of your carrier may give you much trouble over your previous contract and basically refuse to give you service unless you sign up for a new, local region one. Does anyone know of a cell provider that lets you move your number, regardless of region?" It seems that the latest new thing for cellphones has turned into more of a flop, than a feature. Has anyone else run into this problem? Were you able to keep your number, or were you forced to change it?
When I moved from San Francisco to LA (then back again a year later) I never changed my billing. I already had free roaming and no long distance charges, so I just kept my 415 area code, even though I lived in LA. Aside from the slight annoyance of having to explain that I really lived in LA, it was no problem, ATT just sent my bill to my LA address.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
Porting OUTSIDE OF YOUR AREA is not always possible.
The numbers are still linked, geographically, to a specific place.
The carrier where you are going to at the very least, needs to have a presence geographically within the same market that your phone number came out of. I'm not sure how it works internally, but I'd be willing to lay odds that at least some carriers are unable to take a number from one area, and transfer it to another -- like they won't activate a phone for a customer that lives outside their presence area - they can't take a phone number from outside their presence area.
In THEORY, however, as long as both carriers have a presence in the same geographic telephone LEC, then they should be able to port.. they may have to set it up under your old address, then change the billing address.. but it could be done. If they don't have presence in the old location though, it ain't gonna happen.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
The link goes to the story that has the link to the story.. to the story.. with the link.. OH GOD MY MIND!
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I just got my new phone from T-Mobile (via Amazon) today and called around 1:00pm to get the number portability in. The total call lasted 11 minutes, including a phonetree misstep and a service addition. They said that it would take up to 14 business days for the transfer to happen, during which I couldn't use my old number. As luck would have it, my number transferred 6 hours later and I'm up and running!
It wasn't instantanious, but I couldn't imagine things going more smoothly.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
The first wave was the top 100 MSA's (Metro Service Area), so if you are moving from, say, Louisville KY to one of the outlying RSA's (Rural Service Area) or even another MSA in KY, you would be in a different area code and the number portability would be rejected.
As for the posters argument that there should be no problem since you are going from one provider's nationwide plan to another, there is no such thing as "Free long distance" or "Free Roaming", someone has to pay for the towers, radios, switches, and the fiber connecting them. Your provider is constantly analyzing if they can turn a profit on the average user, with average usage per month, at whatever price point we're talking about. The trucker on a $100/month nationwide plan that uses $110 of service will be ballanced out by that persone who buys a 400 minute anytime plan for 40 a month but never leaves your towers/fiber ring/switches.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
All of the number portability things had a disclaimer that it needed to be in the same local market. As someone suggested, just change your billing address if you are happy with your service, if you don't have roaming or long distance charges it should cost you just the same.
I use Nextel, and when I needed a local number in another state, it was no problem to add a second line to my existing service with that number. The model phone I had at the time actually allowed me to have one number show up as "Line 1" and the other show up as "Line 2" - I know with Cingular, at least in NC, the limit is one number per phone.
I've since dropped the second number (you do have to sign a year contract, which is annoying), but I also know Sprint will activate a number for you anywhere from anywhere in the nation.
Also, a lot of the VoIP services will let you choose where your local number is provisioned. I know of a few folks who buy family overseas a "local" number, then send the the VoIP equipment to them. They hook it to the Internet, then call a local number to reach family in Europe or Mexico. Actually, it's pretty slick.
I think eventually, long distance service as we know it will be a thing of the past. My company pays something along the lines of 2.5 cents a minute for intra- and inter-LATA long distance (we actually run a "cooperative" that pools several companies and negotiates lower rates with the LD providers out there - if you're interested, send me an IM - we don't make any money, but the more people we sign up, the lower we can push rates down!) Eventually, the phrase "too cheap to meter" might become a reality.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
T-Mobile gives you unlimited free GPRS with every plan, so you can use your phone's email client without worrying about bandwidth limits. Or you can use your Bluetooth phone to connect to the Internet anywhere you get signal (which in Manhattan, admittedly, means you'll have to sit next to the window, but it's still useful sometimes).
Cingular gives you commercials strangely reminiscent of Apple's "Switch" campaign, except with hot girls.
I did exactly what the poster claims could not be done. Perhaps I got lucky, but here is what I did:
Was using a Sprint phone with Chicago suburbs area code. (And living in another state, I might add.) Moved to NYC. Bought a T-Mobile phone with a NY area code. A bit later, had T-Mobile port my Sprint number over.
Number portability is great! Because of cell phones, area codes are irrelevant, so I figured there was no reason to lose my old number which had served me for so long. (Plus I was getting random calls in Chinese, a language I don't know, meant for the former owner of the NY number.) I know zero, count 'em, zero people for whom area code has any relevance.
our port was handled overnight (verizon --> t-mobile) but that may be plain old luck. interesting about the region-to-region defect.
here's a permanent fix -- how about a permanent number assigned to you for life, like a SSN. dial it, get your friend. yeah, i don't like that idea either, but it certainly is *portable*.
I've been trying since December 6th 2003 to port my landline number to a verizon phone (bought on December 6th). We were told it would take 3-4 days to port the number. I expected 2 weeks.
So far it's been 3 months and I've made more than 25 phone calls to Verizon - and still the number is not ported. To make matters even better the landline carrier, Frontier Telephone of Rochester disconnected my number today. I immediately called Verizon (yes, Verizon) about this. They tried to get a conference call to Frontier but Frontier was closed for the day.
Can someone please tell me what to do? I filed a complaint with the FCC a week or two ago. I tried contacted a local TV news source but they didn't want to help me (or couldn't). I also left a message with the NYS attorney general tonight. I really don't know who to contact.
I switched to Verizon because I was unhappy with Frontier and it wouldn't cost much more to use Verizon and have 2 phones with many more features than my landline carrier. Instead I'm faced with 3 months of phone calls to Verizon and Frontier and both companies pointing the finger at each other (and me wanting to point the finger at both).
Verizons customer support has been very friendly and seemingly helpful but the fact of the matter is that after 25 calls and 3 months time the number still isn't ported.
When I call Frontier they promptly tell me that I should be dealing with Verizon - not them. Their reps are typically very rude. A while back I was lucky enough to get a nice rep who put me in touch with her supervisor. Her supervisor was nice and contacted their porting department (which I can't contact). He said their porting department wouldn't tell him why, but that Verizon wasn't giving them the information they needed to port the number.
To the best of my knowledge Verizon has sent at least 4 port requests. 3 have been ignored and one was denied.
I almost forgot! We were never offered a temp number for the wireless phone so we can only make outgoing calls on it. This has been a major hassle.
Sorry about the rambling nature of this post but I am extremely upset...
Greg
There\'s no place like ~
Did this a few months ago, when they were two separate companies. Attempted to bring my Indy number with me to Chicago. No dice. Said that it was out of the area, even though i wanted to sign up for a local plan - I just wanted to keep my number. For what it's worth, customer service and technical ability was sub par on both sides of the equation. Waiting for the day when we all just have one number (perhaps a IPv6 domain, with subdomains for each of our telephones/computers/gizmos) - that way it's ours till death. Can't wait for the future.
Most of the phone contracts I've read indicate that the carrier has the option of switching you to a local number if you remain outside your home service area for a specified period of time (I think i've seen 3 to 6 months). Since I'm not in the market for a time contracted phone, I only read the contract notes I see in the newspaper or in direct mail, so ymmv.
Need a Catering Connection
Australia has a specific number range dedicated to mobile phones (04XXXX-XXXX). You can't tell where a person is by the number, but since the numbers were originally assigned in arbitrary segments to carriers, you could take a guess what carrier someone was with. Now that number porting has been introduced, a mobile number is exactly that. Not fixed to a location (since it never was) and not fixed to a carrier
Some Australian mobile carriers even allow you to pick your number, charging more for numbers with special digit combinations. but I digress.
The problem with US number portability is that the cell phone number isn't really "portable". It's a hack, because of the lack of foresight in assigning a different area code specifically for cell phones, regardless of carrier or location. To be honest, I don't know any other country that actually uses existing area codes for mobile phones, but then my knowledge of global mobile phone number designations is somewhat limited.
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
Now, my process isn't finished yet, but supposedly it'll be done in the next 24-36 hours.
My problem wasn't that T-Mobile couldn't port my number from Sprint, but that they wouldn't sell me a subsidized phone if they did. I could pay $200 for the "free" Nokia phone, and prices for other phones went up from there. Because of the way their commissions work, they only got commissions on local phone numbers.
So I bought a SIM chip from T-Mobile, ordered a phone from elsewhere, and we'll see what happens when the phone is delivered on Saturday.
I have three phones, all linked on a family plan. We keep two of them here in Massachusetts, and one is with my wife's parents in southern New jersey. But all three have local MA numbers. They were originally with T-Mobile, but I moved them to Cingular in late January. There were no major problems with the port - my phone and my wife's phone went over within a few hours, and the third phone ported a day later. For the day it took, dialing their number from a landline would fail, but dialing it from one of the already ported cells would work fine.
No problems since, either. And the GSM service up here is better with Cingular than it was with T-Mobile.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
If you move you just update your billing address.. if you dont care that your new neighbors will have to dial long distance to speak with you then it's fine.
If you want it to be a local number for where you're moving to then yes you'll have to change your number. The current switching network used worldwide Landline/Wireless will not allow what you're asking to be done. It would be chaos. Until all the SS7 traffic is converted into some sort of IP based system then it might be possible but until then I'd say try verizon wireless. They have a ez move program.
...like they do in Australia ;)
Sure, we have only 19odd million people, but from the outset our mobiles ("cell's") have had separate area codes, originally the area codes indicated carrier, but now we have number portability, we just recognise a mobile number from its 04xx (or +614xx) prefix but cant infer carrier anymore.
just a pointless $0.02
err!
jak
From my understanding of what "Number Portability" was to bring to cell phone users, the ability to keep your number and move to another state was NOT on the list. I understood that number portability was implemented so that someone could move from one cell phone carrier to another and keep the same number.
That's not to say that isn't possible, and I've heard several stories of people who have moved and kept their number. I think that is totally up to the carrier in question and their infrastructure and billing systems. I do not think this was an FCC-mandated feature.
To be honest, I'm surprised the FCC allows it.
You can read more about number portability, success and horror stories, provider discussions, and cell phone capabilities over at Howard Forums. Very good, very high traffic. It's like Slashdot for cell phones. =)
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
The FCC, In it's original mandates to wireline LECs to implement LNP (Local Number Portability) limits portability to a wireline rate center. That is, the area you can call locally on your phone without toll charges or extended area agreements (referred to in the industry as EAS). The reason for this is extreme difficulty in automated billing systems and the technological limitations with "querying" every single call to every ported number in the United States. Respecting these logical and proven limitations, the FCC has retained the same limitation (portable withing the rate center, only) in their mandate on wireless number portability. In other words-- It has never been expected, nor demanded by the FCC or the industry to try to make numbers portable across large geographic regions. There is no "theory" on this matter. LNP has been tested and implemented throughout the United States. It's been working since 1997, when the original mandate came out to wireline LEC (LEC, by the way, stands for Line Exchange Carrier or "service provider"). Wireless rate centers are much larger than wirline rate centers and can overlap several wireline rate centers, but they can only port numbers to the limitation of their presence in the rate center of the carrier they are porting from. So, the wireless carrier cannot port a number to anywhere in their rate center-- They can only port a number to anywhere in the DONOR's rate center. This is how it is supposed to work, and this is how it DOES work. The technology required by service providers nationwide to port numbers over large geographic regions (often referred to in the industry as "geographic portability") is not yet available, and what is available is far too expensive to justify the charges to customers like yourself to recover the cost. Keep tabs on the FCC to find out when it WILL be available.
The FCC, In it's original mandates to wireline LECs to implement LNP (Local Number Portability) limits portability to a wireline rate center. That is, the area you can call locally on your phone without toll charges or extended area agreements (referred to in the industry as EAS). The reason for this is extreme difficulty in automated billing systems and the technological limitations with "querying" every single call to every ported number in the United States. Respecting these logical and proven limitations, the FCC has retained the same limitation (portable withing the rate center, only) in their mandate on wireless number portability. In other words-- It has never been expected, nor demanded by the FCC or the industry to try to make numbers portable across large geographic regions. There is no "theory" on this matter. LNP has been tested and implemented throughout the United States. It's been working since 1997, when the original mandate came out to wireline LEC (LEC, by the way, stands for Line Exchange Carrier or "service provider"). Wireless rate centers are much larger than wirline rate centers and can overlap several wireline rate centers, but they can only port numbers to the limitation of their presence in the rate center of the carrier they are porting from. So, the wireless carrier cannot port a number to anywhere in their rate center-- They can only port a number to anywhere in the DONOR's rate center. This is how it is supposed to work, and this is how it DOES work. The technology required by service providers nationwide to port numbers over large geographic regions (often referred to in the industry as "geographic portability") is not yet available, and what is available is far too expensive to justify the charges to customers like yourself to recover the cost. Keep tabs on the FCC to find out when it WILL be available.