Fellow Resellers,

I wanted to provide an important tip about number porting.

Be SURE you are advising your customers to notify their old (losing) service provider that numbers have been ported out.

Your customer may cancel the old service, but it is important that they also clearly state that the number ported out. I even recommend that they request that the number be "cleared" from the losing network. Do not assume the losing provider will clear the number.

About a year ago, we ported a number from Vonage, but Vonage re-issued the number 6 months later to someone else. So two people had the same number. Big mess.

Then a few weeks ago, we ported a number from Google Voice. Customer canceled account, but Google apparently didn't clear the number. To make matters worse, it appears the customer also never cleared the number from the service they had prior to Google. So some callers were (and still are) being routed to "number disconnected" message. We're trying to get this cleared up, but the customer's business is really suffering.

So going forward, I expect this problem to get worse, as more and more numbers get ported without being cleared from various carriers and small voip provider networks.

Even "aging" the number for 6 months won't help, if voip providers leave old numbers laying around on their networks.

I would expect the industry is going to have to do something about this. But what?

Perhaps better notification to the losing provider that a number ported out. I'm not sure if VOIPo is notified, but I know that Resellers are not typically notified.

Any thoughts, suggestions or experiences from other resellers?