My cell phone has an Illinois number. I live in Mass. I’m looking to switch carriers to AT&T. Can I keep my number? AT&T website states
“A. Port eligibility is the process of verifying that the number requested for porting is local to the service area where the port is to occur, and confirming that AT&T has both a license and coverage in the specified service area. If eligible, you may be able to transfer your existing phone number to AT&T.”
It would seem to imply that I can’t, but I’m not clear what they mean by service area. Do I need to physically be in Illinois or just AT&T.
With Verizon, when I moved from Nashville to Virginia, I could not keep my number because Verizon splits the country into billing regions (or did at this time) and I could only keep the same number for as long as I stayed within the same billing region.
I don’t know whether that is still the rule or if it was ever the rule for non-Verizon customers.
I’m pretty sure that cell phones, being mobile devices, don’t have a home region. I don’t think there are issues porting cell phone numbers no matter what the area code.
Villa, are you talking about Verizon home service, or cell phone service?
It was cell phone service. It was also 5 years ago, so may well have changed by now. It was also complicated by me still having my (at the time soon to be) ex-wife on the account who was moving to Pennsylvania.
If you get service you do not even need to tell them you moved. Your phone will work just as long as you have service and free long distance it wont be a problem.
You need to tell them you moved if you expect to keep getting a bill which you then need to pay to keep getting service. (Besides free long distance, you would also have to make sure that you have AT&T coverage in your area rather than roaming.)
There are probably not technical reasons why you couldn’t keep the same phone number (BTW how did you manage to port an Illinois phone number to Massachusetts?), but the carriers have all kinds of convoluted limitations in their billing and provisioning systems that might limit this.
Not if you setup payments online. Also, as I live just out of Boston, I’m not especially worried about AT&T lacking coverage.
I just never changed it after moving. All payments are automatic and my billing zip code is technically still in Illinois. It created the occassional difficulty, like the local verizon store employees needing to call their national hotline to access my account, but it hasn’t generally been a problem. In fact it was actually helpful in letting my girlfriend keep her number when she joined my plan as she has an Illinois number as well.
Contact expired and AT&T is a bit cheaper and has phones we are more interested in.
It would only be a problem if the carrier didn’t offer service in that area code.
Folks do this all the time… ie, live in one city and have a phone with an area code in another. My brother in law did this while he was across the country in grad school, so that all of his friends and family could call without it being long distance. That’s an issue that’s now largely moot, since most people don;t have to pay long distance charges for calls within the country.
But riddle me this… can you set up a new account with a number from a different area code? Can I walk into the AT&T store on 8th avenue in Manhattan and get a new phone with a Las Vegas area code?
I moved to Wyoming from Michigan and kept my old Sprint number for three years. Just got a new phone last month with Alltel. They wouldn’t let me keep my old number.
Worst case, they could call an AT&T store in Las Vegas and do it over the phone. But … how do they make any money from that?
Many of those stores are actually franchise stores, not owned by AT&T. So it isn’t like ‘the company makes money either way’ – the fees would go to the Las Vegas store, not the Manhattan one. Even if they were both company-owned stores, the internal credit for the sale would probably go to Las Vegas.
So no real incentive for the Manhattan people to help you do this. They might just give you the phone number of the Las Vegas store and tell you to do it with them over the phone.
The answer may not lie in the technology, but the policy. Let me tell you how I did it once, which may suggest a workaround if needed.
I wanted to transfer an unused landline number (I no longer needed dialup for the computer) to a new cellphone. AT&T said they would not port to Cellcom, but they would port to Charter and Charter said they would port to Cellcom.
So the solution was obvious. I ported the number from AT&T to Charter for one day, and confirmed it worked. The next day I called Cellcom and had them port the same number from Charter. Mission accomplished.