Dropping home phone service

[rizzmo]

Currently I have internet and 2 phone line through our local cable provider. One phone line is our home phone which we never use so no problems there. The second line is one we setup for business that we currently don't need, but we need to retain the number. My question is does anyone know of a good/cheap way to keep a phone number. We have a bunch of informational materials that all have this number on it and it would be pretty costly to have it all reprinted. I eventually hope to move the number to Google voice, but need someplace else to keep it until they roll out that feature.

I tried buying a prepaid phone for AT&T and having them port the number to it, but the customer service person informed me that there system wouldn't let her do it. Not sure if the problem was AT&T doesn't allow it, or that the rep just didn't know how to do it. Any suggestions?

[minnie1928]

Can you have the number's billing converted from a flat fee charge to a per call charge? I used to do this years ago with our home line. We didn't make that many calls and it was actually cheaper to pay per call than it was to go flat fee.

[dfeucht]

I know nothing about this other than the commercials, but someone I work with uses Magic Jack - so maybe you can look into that?

[Broken Arrow]

My question is does anyone know of a good/cheap way to keep a phone number.

I believe the question is a two-parter. The first is the cost of keeping a phone number. The second is whether your service will actually allow you to transfer your phone number.

For the first part, I believe MagicJack may be one of, if not the cheapest way to hold on to a phone number. I read something like $20 a year. Currently, the only phone number I have is my Tracfone cellphone, and at an average of $5 to $8 of usage per month, it's still pretty cheap for a phone number. Back to VoIP, there's also Vonage and maybe Skype.

As to the second part, there is a lot of difficulty in getting many of these phone numbers ported. Not so much on a technological level, but more on a corporate level, because these competing businesses have to have some kind of number exchange agreement, and not all of them have that. In this case, it's best to find the service you like, and then get a new number.

OR, consider what I am considering, which is to get rid of phone numbers entirely! Well, I suppose it depends on how badly you need others to instantly contact you, but I've been testing Skype on a mobile device via WiFi and 4G, and while the audio quality isn't exactly sterling, portable VoIP is very feasible! Keeping it strictly VoIP is free (aside from paying for your internet to begin with). And rather than text messages, I can also receive push emails with the same setup.

Anyways, just bouncing some ideas your way.

[kork13]

I'll second Magic Jack as a great way to go. Very cheap, and great voice quality. As to keeping your number, it's not available quite yet, but they just announced yesterday that land-line phone number porting will be available as of 1 Nov 2010. If you can wait another month, I would personally say there's no better option for you by far.

When they say "nominal fee", it will most likely be $5-$10, which is what they charge for almost all of their other add-on services.

Also one more thing to be aware of, one Magic Jack can only support one phone number, one per computer, at a time. You can register multiple phone numbers with the same magic jack, but only one can be used at a time. So if you have it set up for business calls, you wouldn't be able to make/receive any calls on your personal number, and vice versa. The work around, obviously, is buying two magic jacks and hooking them up to two different computers. That doubles the cost of your phone lines, but $40/yr is probably still far cheaper than what you're paying now.