What happens to long distance service when porting?

Posts: 11 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Aug 19, 2007 Posts: 11

Hi all, it's been a long time since I posted around here...

I've had vonage since 2006, and have been very happy with it.

My grandparents are moving from San Bernardino, CA (909 area code) to the house that is immediately behind mine about 40 miles away in Hesperia. (760 Area Code) They've had their 909 phone number for about 40 years, and do not want to lose it.

So I immediately told them to port their number to vonage, which would let them keep their old 909 number and just bring it up here with them. I ordered the device and filled out the port transfer request form two days ago, so the wheels are set in motion.

When I told my grandma about it, she asked, "now, what will happen to my AT&T long distance and my dial-up email?".

Good question.

See, I forgot that they have Verizon for local telephone service, but AT&T for long distance. They also have a separate AT&T dial up account that she continues to pay $10 a month for, just so she doesn't lose her email address. I'm pretty sure the dial-up is unaffected, as I don't believe it is attached to her long distance bill in any meaningful way, but it got me to thinking, what DOES happen to their separate long-distance service through AT&T? does that get canceled automatically as well, or do they have to cancel that on their own?

Any clarifications you guys can give me would be well-appreciated. In the meantime I'm going to keep searching around the forums, but I keep picking the wrong terms to search for and haven't found any results that apply to my situation yet.

Thanks in advance!

-Matt

Posts: 11 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Aug 19, 2007 Posts: 11

just to make sure things went smoothy, tonight I called AT&T on grandma's behalf, and cancelled their AT&T long distance, and switched her dial up AT&T Worldnet account to an email only account for $7.99 a month. So now for the next couple days till the adapter arrives, they will have to use their cell phones for long distance.

I'm still curious to see what would have happened if we didnt cancel, though.

Posts: 144 · Posted: Tue Mar 03, 2009 7:28 pm Post subject:

If your LEC (Verizon) was billing on behalf of AT&T, the account with AT&T will be canceled when your service with Verizon is canceled. If you were paying AT&T directly, then they will be unaware that you are no longer using their service, and will continue billing for the monthly charge even though there will be no usage.

Canceling the long distance account with AT&T was the right move, though you could have waited until the number was ported so as to avoid the inconvenience of having no long distance available during the porting interval.

Posts: 11 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Aug 19, 2007 Posts: 11

DLevenson wrote:

If your LEC (Verizon) was billing on behalf of AT&T, the account with AT&T will be canceled when your service with Verizon is canceled. If you were paying AT&T directly, then they will be unaware that you are no longer using their service, and will continue billing for the monthly charge even though there will be no usage.

Canceling the long distance account with AT&T was the right move, though you could have waited until the number was ported so as to avoid the inconvenience of having no long distance available during the porting interval.

Thanks for the info. I wasn't sure how she was being billed, and the absolute worst thing that could have happened would have been that first situation where Verizon was billing on behalf of AT&T....her email was through AT&T worldnet, which was bundled into her long distance. I absolutely did not want to take the chance that her email might get lost in the shuffle, so I called AT&T and had them split it up. Since she will have cable to run the vonage she didn't need the worldnet dial up, so he cancelled the long distance and put the email address on an email-only account that she pays $8 a month for (a ripoff from my POV but I have tried without success to switch her over to gmail.)

At any rate, it's good to know that it will work out fine. Not having LD at their house for a few days won't be a problem, as they are spending about half their time up here working on their new house, and the other half of the time, they can just use their cell phones for a couple days until the ATA gets here on thursday. I'm kind of excited to see this new box, I have a WRTP54G that I had lots of problems with until i took the routing tasks away from that box and put them on a WRT54GL running DD-WRT. Then it's been solid as a rock ever since.