lnp failure

Guest

I became a Vonage customer at the same time I was moving from one house to another. We had two POTS lines in our old house and my plan was to keep one POTS line in the new house and use Vongae for our second line. My problem was trying to figure out how to keep *both* phone numbers in the new house. Since this was an in-town move it was no problem for SBC to transfer one of the phone numbers to the new residence. But SBC told me that as soon as the second line was disconnected at the old house, that number would no longer qualify for LNP (Local Number Portability) transfer. "No lnp for disconnected numbers." That would mean the number couldn't transfer to Vonage.

My solution was to use a service of SBC called "Mover's VoiceMail." The idea is that you can have voicemail service on a line that is no longer ringing in your old residence. I thought if I put this in place for a month, then that would give Vonage a chance to snag the number before it became truly disconnected. (At least I thought that was worth a try.)

As the end of the month of Mover's Voicemail approached, I started calling the LNP department at Vonage, letting them know that it was now or never. Well, the month passed and my Mover's Voicemail was replaced by a message saying, "[This number] is disconnected. There is no new number."

Through all of this the folks at Vonage were very nice, but seemed to lack any useful information. All they ever said was, "I see your request was transferred to the carrier on January 1st." In fact, "the carrier" is a third party Vonage has contracted with to handle the LNP requests. "The carrier" functions like a black box. An LNP request goes in and then eventually something may pop out. The Vonage folks seem not to know or to be able to find out any of the details about how any given LNP request is fairing with "the carrier." Furthermore, given the very long delays, it seems obvious that "the carrier" is not promptly forwarding the lnp requests they receive from Vonage to the various local phone companies. Perhaps they store them up and send them out in batches?

When I asked one of the Vonage reps who "the Carrier" is, they replied, "That information is confidential." Oh. Wow. I'm not sure the reason for the secrecy, but it surely isn't because using the services of "the carrier" is providing Vonage with any kind of competitive advantage.