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T-Mobile's 'Digits' Solution Lets You Use One Phone Number Across All Your Devices (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: T-Mobile just revealed its answer to ATT's NumberSync technology, which lets customers use one phone number across all their connected devices. T-Mobile's version is called Digits and it will launch in a limited, opt-in customer beta beginning today before rolling out to everyone early next year. "You can make and take calls and texts on whatever device is most convenient," the company said in its press release. "Just log in and, bam, your call history, messages and even voicemail are all there. And it's always your same number, so when you call or text from another device, it shows up as you." When it leaves beta, Digits will cost an extra monthly fee, but T-Mobile isn't revealing pricing today. "This is not going to be treated as adding another line to your account," said COO Mike Sievert. "Expect us to be disruptive here." And while its main feature is one number for everything, Digits does offer T-Mobile customers another big perk: multiple numbers on the same device. This will let you swap between personal and work numbers without having to maintain separate lines and accounts. You can also give out an "extra set" of Digits in situations where you might be hesitant to give someone your primary number; this temporary number forwards to your devices like any other call. You can have multiple numbers for whatever purposes you want, based on T-Mobile's promotional video.
google voice PLUS mailinator for phone numbers.
devices and handsets still each use a phone number (plus another if it's a ported number - one of the reasons porting was fucking stupid) even if you're using "one number" (which is probably one not assigned to a device itself, so there's yet another number) across all of them.... so your household has 6 devices, two numbers, both ported. you're using now 10 (6+2+2) numbers not 8.. or the perceived 2.
lets add temporary numbers to the mix and really kill NANP fast. phone numbers have a cooling-off period between customer assignment (6 months to a year, typically). it would be trivial to DDOS the number pool, even, rendering every unassigned phone number unassignable under those rules.
Shame Project Fi is so badly overpriced in the first place and limited to almost no choice of hardware. I pay $40/line for unlimited voice, texts and data with T-Mobile, with the only catch being that streaming video is throttled to bandwidth sufficient for a 480p feed. With Project Fi, that'd get me a paltry 2GB of data per line before I was paying more than I am now for T-Mobile.
I just checked my usage, and on my phone I'm using 2.9GB/month currently, while my tablet is using 9.7GB/month. (And that's for cellular data only, Wi-Fi not included.) Can't check my other two lines right this second, but even if we pretend that they're not using any data at all, I'd already be paying an extra $50/month for Project Fi over my current plan, which allows me to choose my own device (I bought mine retail from Asia using Expansys), and which is fast and reliable almost everywhere I go (literally the only place it has been spotty for me was Austin, Texas, but my friends on other carriers were all complaining about their coverage there too.)
You couldn't persuade me to switch to Project Fi if you tried.