TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Number Portability: POTS, VoIP, and Cellular

Re: Number Portability: POTS, VoIP, and Cellular

John Levine (johnl@iecc.com)
21 Apr 2006 23:45:04 -0000

> VOIP providers are the 'customer' to the telephone company, and, as
> such 'own' the numbers they were issued by the telephone company.
> They're just letting you 'use' one of their 'direct dial' extensions,
> as it were.

Except sometimes. When I switched from Vonage to Lingo about a year
ago, before mandatory E-911, I ported my number the normal way and it
worked.

I have no idea whether Vonage could have prevented the port if they'd
wanted to. In fact, what happened was that Vonage didn't even notice,
and once I got Vonage to cancel the account (I got their attention by
turning off the credit card number to which the account was charged),
they thought the number was still theirs but unassigned. This had the
effect that anyone in the world other than Vonage customers could call
me, while Vonage customers got an out of service recording. Since I
don't get calls from many Vonage customers, I didn't care.

Then about two months ago, Vonage assigned my old number to a new
customer, a student at a nearby college, and I got some rather
confused calls from her father who was rather bent out of shape that
he called the number that his daughter had given him and that showed
up on his caller ID box, and got me instead. Fortunately, I had a
simple way to fix it: I happen to be acquainted with a one of the
members of Vonage's corporate board of directors, and sent him a note
which he forwarded to Vonage management, and it was all fixed within a
day. If I hadn't had that side channel, I doubt it would ever have
been fixed.

R's,

John

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