Google Voice to Allow Number Porting from Landlines

Posted on Thursday, 20 January | Comments

For the low cost of $20, Google Voice plans to allow users to port over their existing landlines to their Google Voice accounts.  The Time Magazine blog Techland calls it “a warning shot across the bow of old-school landline telephone service.” I totally agree.  This is another big step as our media consumption and communication shifts to the cloud.  

If you’re not familiar, Google Voice acts as a kind of switchboard and central hub for your phone calls, so porting your landline number to Google Voice would allow you to keep your number while allowing it to connect through to all of your other phones/devices.

From Techcrunch: 

We’ve been huge fans of Google Voice for quite a while now — it makes screening calls and managing multiple phones a breeze — but there’s always been a huge thorn in its side: it didn’t allow people to port their existing phone numbers over. In other words, in order to take advantage of all of Google Voice’s benefits, you’d have to get a new phone number. Now, after years of waiting, that’s finally changing: Google has quietly enabled number porting for Google Voice.

Update: Google tells us that this is currently just a test available to some users and is not rolling out to everyone yet. However, it seems likely that a wide scale launch is coming soon.