The Trouble With Porting a Number

When you move from one phone carrier to another and decide to keep the same telephone number, this is called a port or porting a number. As phone plans have become more competitive, with many companies bundling services together, many people are choosing to move away from expensive phone plans with providers, like Telstra.

Generally speaking, porting a number is a fairly simple exercise. You’ve probably changed mobile phone carriers in the past and managed to keep the same phone number with relative ease. This is known as a simple port.

The more services you have added to a number, however, can make porting slightly more difficult. If you have services like voicemail, line hunting (distributing telephone calls from one phone number to a group of several phone lines), call groups (similar to conference calls), the internet, EFTPOS or ISDN, porting your telephone number becomes known as a complex port.

Some carriers don’t offer a complex porting service, and for those that do a complex port is significantly more expensive than a simple port—sometimes costing upwards of three times that of a simple port, depending on your carrier.

It’s also called a complex port for a reason: because it’s not without its complications. Most of the time a complex port can take longer to go through, and even then a complex port can fail. Most carriers charge a porting fee, so a complex port can become quite expensive if it should fail in the first instance—or the second or the third!

Instead of paying for an expensive complex port that could prove to be problematic, anyway, you’re better off cancelling those services with your current phone carrier and paying for a simple port. Once the number has been ported, you can then resume those services with your new carrier. This also allows you to get rid of any services that you were paying for but didn’t really need or use.

If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to your current phone plan, and you want to port your number, Virion has a number of competitive VoIP plans to suit any business. Contact us today.

Want to Port Away from Telstra?

If you are looking to save money, get more features and take your phone number with you? Visit our VoIP Partners website and learn how you can get a VoIP Phone System for only $1 per month.