Pro's & Con's of Porting Your Old Cell Phone Number

[Navigator]

OT... Thanks to the FCC it is now possible to jump ship from your current cell phone provider and force them to pass your phone number to your new provider.

I am opening up this discussion to see if any of you have gone thru this process to share your experiences.

[WyrreJ]

I just saw on slashdot that there is currently an auction for 867-5309 on ebay that has been bid up to at least $8K.

[Heraclid]

My wife and I just did this... well, we did it over a month ago. And mine went through no sweat (like 2 days to go through and old phone remains usable until then), but hers just did finally get done right after several attempts and a lot of time spent on the phone. I think it was just a series of incompetent operators who kept doing more harm than good when they did anything. We switched from AT&T to Cingular. I recently heard that those are the two with the most customer complaints (Verizon was the best). Also we have had a few times we've gotten dead air for a few seconds and couldn't hear each other. It's probably not anything to really be concerned about unless it becomes routine.

[WyrreJ]

Everybody should watch their bills for BS "number portability charges." Some carriers are tacking a couple of bucks on each bill with this description. To me, this is totally backwards - they are charging their customers who don't switch and letting the switchers go - probably to a carrier that doesn't try to charge such bogus fees.