What's it like to switch cell carriers these days?

July 27, 2020 8:20 PM

Spouse Proust and I would like to switch carriers from Verizon to ATT, because of particularly poor Verizon coverage in a locale we frequently frequent. How Does this work? I gather we'll get new sims, and then... just magic, the numbers port the moment we put the new sims in?

Spouse has very intense work currently, and can't have their phone service interrupted, inbound or outbound. They need reliability. Any unknown of "maybe your phone won't work for a few hours" probably means we can't do switch.

Is the process just:

1. Sign up for some contract on the ATT website; tell them we already own our phones and want to port our numbers from our current carrier.
2. ATT sends us two new sims in the mail.
3. Our phones and phone numbers keep working with Verizon while we wait for the sims to arrive.
4. We pop in the new sims when we arrive, wait maybe five minutes for things to churn, and then bingo our phone numbers now go through ATT and arrive out our newly simmed phones.

Is that the process? Or is there some murky unreliableness in there?

In case it matters we live in Massachusetts and use unlocked iPhones. I want to switch soon because we will be spending a week in that other locale where our Verizon service is torture and the ATT service is merely bad.

posted by Winnie the Proust to Technology (13 answers total)

I went the other way (ATT to Verizon) and went into the office, and yep, they switched some things around, did something on a computer, and then I was good to go. Took about 30 mins, mostly of explaining things to me and making me sign papers.
posted by The otter lady at 8:40 PM on July 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

If you change step 2 to going into a store (wearing masks - all employees are required to be masked) then you won't have to wait. I understand not wanting to sit in a store for the time it takes to set up a new account, so do try to set that up online or over the phone. You should make sure you have all the info for your current Verizon account, including account number(s) that are not your phone number.

I got a new sim a few weeks ago and it was active before I left the store - but that did not involve a number port.
posted by soelo at 8:55 PM on July 27, 2020

It's not necessarily quite that seamless, you need to request a "port" and that involves AT&T calling Verizon and Verizon calling you and getting permission, and yes, often an account number that is not the phone number. The old SIM should still work while that's ironing itself out, until things actually switch, which you'll only be able to tell when things stop working on the old SIM and start working on the new one. But there's no way to guarantee that everything will go smoothly. Anyone who tells you so is selling a bill of goods. Five minutes is probably not possible under any scenario. It can be fast, but not that fast. Account changes have to be propagated to cell towers all over the country and, to be frank, no company heavily optimizes their outbound port process because that's just helping the competition.
posted by wnissen at 9:04 PM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

When I last ported my number, I didn't have much dead time -- instead, the question was which sim card it would ring on.

So, if y'all have a spare unlocked phone (or you're willing to loan your iPhone), maybe Spouse Proust could have one phone with their old SIM, and one with the new, and just answer whichever rings?
posted by Metasyntactic at 9:17 PM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I am in Canada, so the carriers you’re dealing with are different, but we did what you are planning to do and it was not seamless, despite what the new carrier promised us. The old carrier ended our service abruptly, as soon as our new carrier notified them we were switching. Unfortunately there was a lag in the courier service, and this was 36 hours before we received the new SIMs, so there were about 36 hours where we had no cell service at all. We were able to get our new carrier to make it up to us by bumping us to the next level data plan for free, but it was not seamless and I was actually quite mad about it at the time because we had been reassured it would be.

I’d avoid anything where you are counting on your new SIM cards to arrive via mail or courier, if you absolutely cannot have a break in service. If you can go to a store to get them, as we did before, it should be seamless.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:27 PM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I ported from AT&T to T-mobile 2 years ago. It was 4 lines. There was zero downtime. The hard part was the inconvenience of having passwords and details of the old account and sitting in the store for 30 minutes. Two of the phones were with my kids across the country. One was in the army and needed his phone in a critical way. His line was switched only upon his say so. He switched a day later bc he wanted to pick up his sim at a store and have them work through the process.

It was seamless. No downtime at all. When switching between the "major" carriers, it is my experience that they all cooperate and do this all the time.

I went from VZ to AT&T a few years before the switch to T-mobile. Also easy as pie. Both times I did the port in person. Not sure how the mail a sim would work, but I suspect it would be just as smooth.

The suggestion to have an extra phone is a good safety net. Also, try it on 1 phone at a time. Port your line and if that works, port his.

Fwiw, I ported a land-line to a cell phone and that had about 30 minutes of downtime.
posted by AugustWest at 10:56 PM on July 27, 2020

Response by poster: Thank you all. Interesting. It sounds like for best chances of a smooth transition I should go in person. I'll talk with Spouse Proust and will take the step.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:54 AM on July 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

If you have good AT&T coverage consider using Cricket Wireless instead. It is a subsidiary of AT&T, uses the same towers and is sooooooo much less expensive. You aren’t paying for the “free” phone upgrades every couple years.

I went from paying $120/month (with my wife’s school discount) to paying $70/month for both lines, unlimited texts, and now 5GB per month of data.
posted by terrapin at 7:18 AM on July 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Hey! I did this recently for my mom. Verizon recently changed some sort of protocol for allowing numbers to be ported. You need to be able to access your Verizon account to generate some sort of transfer PIN. We happened to be the first people to go through this at the ATT store we were at, and it took much longer than it should. But just make sure you have your log-on info for Verizon (or have the app installed on your phone). Also, we were able to stay in our car for a big chunk of this, and he masked ATT people just came out to us, but we were in a store with a parking lot.
posted by kimdog at 8:02 AM on July 28, 2020

Went to V from A a couple years ago had to replace all phones A was GSM and V was not then. Might be different now.
posted by tilde at 8:29 AM on July 28, 2020

Since his account can't get messed up because of his work, how about YOU switch over and decide how difficult it's going to be for him to follow?
posted by summerstorm at 9:49 AM on July 28, 2020

We recently switched from Verizon to T-Mobile and it wasn't so seamless. With the new SIM in place, my old Samsung still thought it was a Verizon phone, so it refused to make calls. I had to go into some pretty deep settings (following a guide I found online) to get the phone to communicate with T-Mobile's network, and it still doesn't always work for wifi calling.

Definitely go into a store.
posted by tacodave at 4:41 PM on July 28, 2020

Response by poster: It's good to know that I will need my Verizon login information. I have thought, though I don't have it memorized. I'll make sure to bring it with me if I go to a store in person.

To answer summerstorm's suggestion, we want to switch both accounts at the same time because we are on a family plan and it will be much more expensive to have two separate plans.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:00 AM on July 29, 2020