Porting from Att&T

[sk2812]

I have been on the phone with your porting department for 3 hr they are unable to port. And the att number has been ported to verizon from att

[SynthpopAddict]

I hope whomever in Porting that you're speaking to has started a 3 way call with AT&T to see if maybe there's a problem on your old carrier's side?  In rare instances, a number cannot be ported; it's usually landlines that have that issue, but there can be circumstances where some kind of red tape keeps a number with some company and it can't be moved.

Other things which can be causing the problem:

-The transfer PIN may be expired, or you need a new one

-If you were a prepaid customer with AT&T, I'd be willing to bet that their prepaid accounts are under a different nomenclature than the postpaid ones.  If someone left off a digit or letter when attempting to enter the account number, then it's not going to work.  I had this happen when I ported to Pink Logo Place briefly.  The salesperson kept leaving off the first letter of my Verizon prepaid account and the port refused to go through until I told him to try adding the letter to the front...and then my number ported immediately!

-If you owe money to AT&T, they may be holding your number.

-If you are bringing your own phone, is it unlocked?  A phone locked to some other network won't work.

-If your phone is eSIM only, the eSIM may have to be manually activated by someone at Verizon before it'll work.

[Melvada]

This is helpful. There are two things I can see in your list that we haven’t tried: We still have to pay our final AT&T bill and will do so before tomorrow morning, when I’ll be getting back on the phone with Verizon to try and get this sorted out before I have to be at work. And then I don’t know if the phone is locked or not — how can I find that out?

Thank you for your helpful advice!

[SynthpopAddict]

You're welcome, Melvada.  Wow.  Sorry to hear you're going through a porting nightmare.  Yes, I would pay off your last bill with AT&T just in case that is causing any issues.  You mentioned you purchased new iPhones with Verizon.  These new iPhones will be locked to Verizon until they are successfully activated and used on Verizon for 60 days.  There should be something in the phone settings which will tell you the network lock status.

As for why your wife's phone refuses to work - there was some kind of problem with iPhone eSIMs in particular which several people posted about a couple months ago when the iPhone 16 first launched.  A Verizon tech support person may have to delete the eSIM which is already on the phone and put in a new one, then manually push through the activation.  The system may say the phone is activated, but it is not.

Hopefully it isn't that your wife's number permanently belongs to AT&T and can't be moved.  As I'd mentioned in my earlier post, that's usually a landline problem, but if your wife's number was from a very rural area and Verizon has no interconnection agreement with whomever originally had that number (but AT&T does), then the number can't be moved to Verizon.  If you Google "can some phone number not be ported" it'll come up with more details.

[Melvada]

Thanks SynthpopAddict — I really appreciate you taking the time to reply. Last week’s phone porting snafu was resolved the next day, when we found out we had to “reactivate” our AT&T account for my wife’s number, and then do the whole porting thing again. Somehow the AT&T account was deactivated before everything was properly done. And we didn’t find this out via any tech support calls or anything, just by digging (and digging) into the information we could find out about our account on the Verizon site.

So I sure am glad we got it sorted. Even though we had to essentially establish a whole “new” account with AT&T to reactivate my wife’s number there. That was tedious, and I honestly wonder if it isn’t a little suspect on AT&T’s part — they got a whole new month of billing out of us for reactivating her account for a handful of hours. That’s not a Verizon problem, but it’s a little fishy to me and makes me even more glad we switched.

Anyway, thank you again! Great taste in music, by the way.

[SynthpopAddict]

You're welcome once more.  Sorry to hear your old carrier ended up billing you for another month before you could get all your lines moved over.  Sometimes, a port has to be cancelled and then redone before things work, which is why I always tell people to try contacting their previous carrier if a port gets stuck.  There are a variety of things which can go wrong, and it can take a while before the problem is identified and fixed.  At least you didn't end up having to get a completely new number - I read of one instance where someone's number got hopelessly lost during a port and could not be recovered by either their old carrier or Verizon!  I've personally had 2 unrelated problems concerning porting on 2 occasions, both of which ended up having me pay 2 different carriers for an entire month's service for the same phone number in the same month...

Thanks for the kind words, BTW.  Not everyone agrees with us, as even my mom once told me, "Nobody likes your music!" 🤣

[Melvada]

I am having exactly the same problem. We have two new iPhones with Verizon and have ported our numbers over from AT&T. My wife and I spent a total of five hours today on the phone with tech support — even a 4-hour long 3-way call between ourselves, a Verizon rep, and an ATT rep. Still no luck. My phone is working mostly fine, but my wife’s phone cannot receive most phone calls and texts from most people, but texts from me are coming through.

This has been a massively frustrating —and still fruitless — endeavor. I don’t know if this is more an ATT problem or a Verizon problem, but I have never had so much difficulty switching carriers in the past. Both my wife and I have lost almost an entire day of work trying to get this sorted and apparently nobody has any answers for us. I find it hard to believe that this is some impossible situation that neither Verizon nor ATT can fix. Any advice?

[vzw_customer_support]

We are sorry to read that you've been having issues with your new service, as this is never the experience we want you to have. If you are still having issues, let us know, and we'll be glad to help out.

~Freddy