How To Port Your Vonage Phone Number to Google Voice

How do you keep your Vonage phone number and lose the expensive monthly fee? Simple – you port it to google voice. Unfortunately there is one key step that is easily overlooked in the port – and if you do, you lose your phone number. Scary huh?

Vonage is a great service – VoIP for cheap with international calls thrown in – that’s why I selected it for my business line a few years back. Now I’ve switched to Skype and Google Voice, and this is the process to port from Vonage to Google Voice.

1. Port your Vonage number to AT&T. I chose AT&T as I already had a Go Phone which I give to international visitors. I did this in the AT&T store, and they took care of it all for me for a $25 sim card. Keep the receipt or make a note of your AT&T account number. This put me on a 3 month / 10c per minute plan so I could receive calls in the interim. The process took about 48 hours to complete.
2. Sign up for google voice, and select the option to port an existing number to google voice. There are a few disclosures about 3 potential days of lost SMS messages, and you pay a one time $20 porting fee. The trick here is finding your AT&T account number, which is not the same as your phone number. I threw away my receipt, so I had to call 611 from my Go Phone to talk to find it out.
3. Wait 24 hours.

Enjoy free call forwarding and google voicemail services. The switch cost me $45, and I no longer pay my $30 a month Vonage bill. It would have been cheaper to add a line to my existing cell phone service for a month (around $10 rather than $25), but this way kept everything simple for me, and simplicity goes a long way when you’re talking about transferring your business number and not losing calls!