Discussion of Number Porting and failing to cancel old service

[GreenLantern]

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?

[redoneusa]

I deal with this on a daily basis. Though with different providers- the key here is what actions were taken by the winning carrier in this case Voipo. Granted the problem of the number ringing in the switch actually is an issue with the losing carrier - typically our procedure is to open up a ticket and provide call examples to resolve.

It's important the customer understands the problem sadly is at the door of the former provider. But in the nature of delivering an outstanding customer experience hopefully Voipo works with you to resolve the customers issues.

[jsiepka]

Greenlantern thanks for the heads up with Vonage and Google. We have had our fair share of porting nightmares. Including us not clearing the number from our account when we were the losing carrier as no one informed us that the numbers were gone. Long story short we got the numbers back and the customer is very happy with us and Voipo. I don't think the porting department will forget the issues we had for the past year (yes I said year) with CallOne.

So far the few times we've had issues support has been outstanding.

Maybe we should start a new forum just covering porting issues and list the carriers, the problems to expect, and the solutions?