Porting versus forwarding: why we tell practices not to port
Porting is free with us and we still recommend against it. Here is the failure mode that changed our minds.
There are two ways to get a new phone service answering your practice line. You can port the number, which moves ownership of it to the new carrier. Or you can forward it, which leaves the number exactly where it is and simply redirects calls.
Porting sounds cleaner. One number, one carrier, no redirection. It is also the option that can take your practice phone offline for a day.
A port is a coordinated handoff between two carriers, and it fails in ordinary ways: the service address on file does not match, the account name is the practice's old legal entity, someone has a PIN lock on the account they do not know about. When it fails mid-flight, the number can end up in a state where the old carrier has released it and the new one has not accepted it. That is a dead practice line, and the fix runs on the carriers' timetable, not yours.
Forwarding has none of that. Your carrier keeps your number. You dial a star code — usually *72 followed by the destination — and calls redirect. You dial *73 and they stop. The whole operation is reversible in about thirty seconds from any handset in the office.
The objection we hear is that forwarding feels like a workaround. It is not. Conditional forwarding is a first-class feature of every business phone system sold in the United States, and it is how call centers, answering services and after-hours lines have worked for forty years.
There is one case where porting is genuinely the right answer: you are already leaving your current carrier for unrelated reasons and consolidating anyway. If that is you, port — just do it as its own project, on a Monday, with your old service still live.
Otherwise, forward. We port numbers for free and we will still try to talk you out of it.