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Comment by gagege | Hacker News Reader

My family is definitely going to be doing this next month when our Sprint contract is over. I'm also going to port our phone numbers over to Google Voice to avoid any future porting fees.

The abysmal world of mobile phone carriers seems to be making some good improvements.

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How does porting to Google Voice work? Can you set your Google Voice number to be the same as your number through your wireless provider?

Currently I have a Google Voice account but it is a different number than my phone service.

I've never had to pay a porting fee? (Beside my time arguing with AT&T to move a number from one prepaid MVNO to another.)

Be careful with Google voice as your mobile number. Your texts won't be texts but will come in via an app. And it doesn't support MMS. You may not care about receiving photos but MMS is used to send multi-recipient text messages as well.

The net effect is that if anyone, ever tried to send a text message to you and several other people at the same time you will not receive it. You will not receive a notice or anything, it will just silently fail and the sender will assume you are ignore them.

Ah, good to know. That's bummer though. I guess I'll have to live with the fees.

I've used GV as my only number for a few years now.

> The net effect is that if anyone, ever tried to send a text message to you and several other people at the same time you will not receive it.

I do receive these. I haven't ever heard from anyone "Hey, you didn't come to my <birthday party, other event>!?!?!

I cannot send them. YMMV?

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