Why can't they port a phone number **interally**?

A few months back, we activate an older iPhone for Moon Unit’s use. We activated it with the Veridiots as a prepaid phone. The deal was, if she managed with it for 3-4 months without losing or breaking it, we’d get her a newer one. We ported in her old phone number from T-Mobile at the time.

So 3-4 months later and she’s kept her bargain, so we got her the new iPhone and added it to our family plan.

Only… Verizon insisted they could NOT port the old number, nosiree, they’d have to deactivate it, and then someone else would probably grab it and we’d lose it.

I whined and complained and they finally figured out a way to do it - something to do with temporarily creating a 5th phone line on the family share plan, and then adding the old phone to the family share, then switching the old phone’s number to the new phone, and then deactivating the old phone’s service.

A friend was just bitten by this same thing. She had a Verizon prepaid phone, and they refused to sort things out for her to remain with Verizon when she wanted to buy a new phone (on contract, so they’d have locked her in for a solid 2 more years).

So, she went with a different carrier entirely, as she really did NOT want to lose the phone number.

WTF, Verizon? Are the other carriers as bad??? Why on EARTH would they make it HARDER to stay with them???

None of that makes any sense. Transferring an existing number to a new phone with the same carrier is common as dirt.

My guess is that Verizon contract phones and Verizon pre-paid phones are run basically as separate companies, so they might need to pretend that the number is coming from an outside company (ATT, Sprint, etc).

Was their any sort of promo deal involved? I recently upgraded my phone, and there was a buy one/get one free for a particular model - but you had to add an extra line to get the free one. You could cancel that line after a month, but it had to be added.

Ah, I missed the part about it being a prepaid phone. That probably has something to do with it.

I used to work there. This is close to the answer.

It’s all one company and one infrastructure, but prepaid and postpaid employees can only access their respective accounts. They can’t port the number, because the company (Verizon) already controls it. But a postpaid employee can’t access the prepaid account to merge the lines or transfer the number.

It’s not impossible, though. Verizon DOES have a specific process to do exactly this, but the problem is that it’s clunky and requires very specific circumstances to work. That’s probably why OP had to deal with the “temporary fifth line” rigamarole.

All the stuff with phone numbers is WAY messier than you probably think. There’s multiple complicated databases and internal routing numbers and multiple companies all having coordinate who owns what. There’s no feeling like being on a call with a customer whose phone isn’t working and finding out AT&T assigned the same number to one of their customers because the number inventory wasn’t updated correctly.

Thanks for the insight (and I can imagine how frustrating THAT was!!).

My friend had a different number a year or so back, that was “owned” by her former employer (I don’t know the details but they were paying the bill for a while). Then they cut it off and did not free the number up. And Verizon would not allow her to reserve the number when it became available. So she had to get a new number when she activated the prepaid account.

So she was NOT prepared to risk another forced phone number change. I suggested she port the number to Google Voice but that would have meant having no phone for a couple days while that got sorted out.

So she finally got the new phone, with another major carrier - and when they activated, she was getting calls and texts on BOTH phones for a while, which was pretty strange.