Porting: THE MISSING LINK(S) Could this be you?

[hwgang]

A bit of history: Happy ooma customer here porting two (secondary) numbers from Vonage. Keeping a third number with Vonage until I can port it to ooma and not have it be a virtual number. Given ooma's fast-paced feature roll-out, I'm sure this won't be long.

First number ports in 5 weeks. Notification was slow for the first port. I had to fax, then email in the LOAs when the second number was not reported as being in queue, but I was given notice via email of the porting date, etc..

Second porting process has had NO communication. No dates. No idea when. Nuthin'. Couldn't understand the hold-up. Finally called ooma again, yesterday (and at 12:30 EDT there was NO hold music at all.....Joe just picked right up!! WTG!!) and Joe said that if there is an outstanding bill they can refuse the port.

Well, bust my buttons if THAT nugget isn't crucial info!

My Vonage account (had them since 2005) has been a MESS recently and every attempt to straighten it out has resulted in frustration, so I decided to let the bill just sit there and when it dropped drastically with the second porting I'd jump back in again. Because I knew that porting a number out makes them MUCH more willing to talk to you and make you happy. (IF you're leaving other numbers behind---even temporarily---as I was.)

Well, the bill was what was holding it up, only nobody told me that! (Vonage also confirmed it when I asked.) I don't know why it's not info that is more out in the world, but I'm sure glad Joe told me! I've ported numbers twice before, too, so I'm hardly a porting newbie, but I never knew this and have never read it.

So I pay off Vonage and the account ports in about 4 hours!!

The only bad news is that with NO notification of what was happening (and no expectation of porting without notification) we thought an account was a mess. We were even on a conference call with ooma and Vonage today and nobody said the account had ported. Vonage thought it was a technical error on their end, too. So FIVE HOURS later on CS with Vonage (UGH!) word finally comes through that the problem had been all along in this most recent issue that the number HAD PORTED.

A big hip hip hurray from me!

One other tip from Vonage: According to them having features (call forwarding, etc) on your line can prevent it from porting. At least that is there experience when porting TO Vonage. When we were trying to identify today's number issues we also stripped all our features from the line to facilitate porting. Little did we know that it had already happened, but that tip may fall into the category of Couldn't Hurt.

The moral of the story: If you're having porting delays do you owe the other company money or do you have a lot of features on the account?

[hwgang]

Update on this: in post-port conversations with ooma the final hold-up seemed to be the features we had active on our Vonage line: including call forwarding. Once we removed those it was mere minutes til the port occured.