Taking Your Phone Number With You - Number Portability

Telephone number portability is a service that provide residential and business telephone customers with the ability to retain, at the same location, their existing local telephone number when switching from one local telephone service provider to another.

The type of telephone number portability that local telephone companies must provide is called "service provider portability". Service provider portability allows a customer to keep his telephone number when changing local telephone companies. It does not allow customers to take their telephone numbers with them when they move outside the area code calling area.

What is the Long Term Telephone Number Portability End User Charge?

Local Providers can recover the costs of implementing and providing telephone portability through two kinds of changes:

Charges paid by other telephone companies that use a telephone company's number portability facilities to process their own calls, and

a small fixed monthly charge assessed on telephone customers or "end users".

The long term number portability end user charge is a fixed monthly charge, usually called a Carrier Recovery Charge these days, through which local telephone companies may recover certain costs of providing long term number portability service. Recoverable costs include those for creating new facilities, physically upgrading or improving the existing public switched telephone network, and performing the ongoing functions associated with providing long term number portability. FCC rules state that incumbent local telephone companies may, but are not required to, recover certain costs of providing number portability by charging their customers a monthly fee.

Local telephone companies can only charge customers in areas where local telephone number portability is available to all consumers. Telephone number portability may not be available in all service areas.

The FCC allows, but does not require, local telephone companies to pass certain costs of implementing and maintaining long term number portability on to the customers. For example, the FCC allows incumbent local telephone companies to recover only costs directly related to providing long term telephone portability, which keeps the charges passed on to the consumer, if any, as small as possible. New entrants to the local telephone market, wireless telephone portability service, and long distance companies also incur additional costs in handling calls to numbers that are portable. Because the FCC neither regulates the rates nor dictates the maximum amount carriers can charge their customers, carriers may choose to recover their costs of providing long term telephone number portability in any lawful manner consistent with their obligations under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Your local telephone company may continue to assess the charge on your telephone bill for five years from the date it first began itemizing the charge on your bill. At the end of the five year period, your local telephone company must stop assessing the charge.

Different Telephone Companies charge different amounts. Telephone companies have a variety of network equipment and can incur different costs in preparing their systems to provide number portability. The charge that appears on your monthly telephone bill for number portability may cover certain costs of implementing and providing number portability service.

Can I keep the same Wireless telephone number if I switch my Local Telephone service to a Cellular or Personal Communications Service (PCS) Telephone Service Provider or Vice Versa?

Cingular/AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and all the other major carriers and other wireless carriers are required to provide telephone number portability as well. For this reason, customers can retain the same local telephone number if they change their local service from a wireline local telephone company to a wireless carrier such as cellular or PCS. Likewise, customers can switch from a cellular or PCS provider to a local wireline service provider and keep the same cellular or PCS telephone number. See also Wireless Portability