I have had a love/hate relationship with my cellular provider for some time. Long enough ago that it could well be the beginning, I was with AT&T, but their customer service irked me fiercely. Between one thing and another, I hadn’t taken the plunge to a different service, but then my son accidentally bought a Tracfone phone that was locked to that service. You see, we had been buying cheap prepaid phones to use with our AT&T sim cards, but he didn’t realize that some of them used different background networks.
Well, he just got another phone, and the Tracfone device lay around our house for a while, seeking purpose. That purpose arrived when AT&T started disabling our older devices. I activated the Tracfone for my wife, ported the number over, and it was smooth sailing.
However, there were storms on the horizon. Tracfone’s customer service rivals AT&T for horror, and there was one complication after another. Finally, they switched off my phone — the one AT&T had sent me when they were shutting down my older phone.
Well, this got me interested in options again, and I found Reach Mobile. I haven’t used them long enough to know if I like them, but they have been marginally more communicative than Tracfone, and they don’t insist on calling back on an unrelated number “within 15 minutes” which is always longer and then making me wait on hold after they call me.
So, to transfer your number from one phone service to another, you need four pieces of information.
- The name of the company you’re transferring from. In my case, this was Tracfone.
- The account number. This is trickier, especially if you have multiple phones with a vendor. For Tracfone, it’s the last 15 digits of your SIM card number, which you can find with a magnifying glass on the back of your SIM card if you pull it out of the phone.
- The PIN code. This was a real stumper. After wasting time with the chat support at Tracfone, waiting for someone to call me back, waiting on hold for the person who called me to pick up, I finally found that I could have gotten it by myself. To get the Number Transfer Pin for a Tracfone, text NTP to 611611 on the phone that has the number you’re transferring from.
- The billing zip code.
Well, once I had located these pieces of information, I was set. There was one small snag: since I had activated my SIM card with Reach Mobile, they were unable to change the number on it. Fortunately, they send two SIM cards when you sign up, so I was able to use the second card to receive my old number.
Well, I’m still waiting for the transfer to go through. Reach suggested contacting Tracfone to ask them to hurry it up, but I think I’d rather carry around two phones for a bit longer.