Our daughter has been on our family plan since forever. She’s also been living in South America since 2013 and comes home for maybe a month per year. I want to to take her off our cell plan, but she doesn’t want to lose her US number. Is it possible for me to port her number into GV? If she pops her T Mo sim card in, she can get any kind of verification texts, if that matters. I’ve also read about using a VPN from Brz as a work around. Any help would be appreciated.
You can port a number into google voice (costs $20 for this–a one time fee; not recurring).
I’ve been using google voice as my default contact number without issue for many years, with the single caveat that some institutions don’t let you use VOIP numbers for verification–Chase bank for me doesn’t work, and services like Steam won’t either (there are others)–for this I use the cell number I got from my carrier.
You may not need any action on the phone with the SIM card itself to port from t-mobile to google voice (some carriers do require a response to a text message to authorize the port-out); you will need the port out info from t-mobile to supply in the google voice port-in process, which you can get from t-mo support or probably looking around online.
Your daughter will need your account pin to port out of t-mobile. Once that’s done, wait a few hours and the number should move to her GV account. The nice thing with GV is she can use her computer or phone to make wifi calls to anyone in the US for free. I can confirm it works well in Brazil. The trick for the phone is to make sure the Google voice app is set to ‘prefer Wi-Fi’
Thanks friends! I have the PIN I need to port out of T Mo, but she has her phone in Brazil. Would it be easier (or even possible?) for me to do it for her from the US or have her do it herself using a VPN. Google voice works in Brazil, but you can’t sign up in Brazil. If you try, you get a “GV is not available in your country” message.
You don’t need her Brazilian phone number. She need to get into her Google account, sign up for Google voice and transfer the number from Google (and pay a on-time fee of $20). At no time should she provide her Brazilian phone number.
She needs to sign up for Voice (via https://voice.google.com/) from her own Google account. If she’s unable to do so (based on IP geolocation) then yes a VPN would be the workaround. Or she could temporarily let you do this for her from the US.
She’ll be given a new number, and will be prompted for a US forwarding number. She can use her existing T-Mobile number for this step. Once the account has been created, she can then port that same number into GV. (This will obviously remove the forwarding feature and she’ll get a warning about this, but as long as she uses data to access GV she’ll be fine).
You may need to do the port from the US, but she’ll need to give you the verification codes she receives on her T-Mobile line. Or she may be able to initiate the port herself from Brazil with a VPN and the verification codes from her T-Mobile line.
Yes. As long as you have access to her Google account, it would be better for you to do it from the US. All you’ll need from her is the code GV will text to her phone # being ported in.