Convert your paid home phone to free home phone while you keep your old number

Google Voice for Home Phone is a dream come true for people who need to relocate. Moving your home is a pain by itself and more often than not the hassles of your previous provider not serving the new location leaves you with no option but to give up your home phone number. Moreover, there is always a monthly payment of $10-$25 for home phone service. We recently posted about using Google Voice for free calls to USA and Canada. In that post we also mentioned how to use Google Voice as a home phone. Some of the people were reluctant as they did not want to change their home phone number. There is a way out to let you port your landline phone number to Google Voice, that we have discovered and are going to share with you.

The process of moving your home phone to Google voice based home phone is very simple. It involves

1. Port your home phone number to a prepaid mobile phone
2. Port your prepaid mobile phone number to Google voice
3. Use Google Voice as your home phone number

Step 1: Port your current number to a cell phone

Google Voice lets you port your mobile (cell) phone number to Google voice so that you can enjoy the extended features only supported by Google Voice while keeping your number. The only caveat is that you can not port a home phone number to Google Voice. Therefore, you need to find a work around. The best that we have found is to make sure that your home phone number is actually converted to a mobile phone number. Almost all wireless service providers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon etc., allows you to port a home phone number to prepaid mobile phone. The sim only option costs about $5-$10 and you get a new sim card with your home phone number. 

The steps for this step would be

1. Go to your favorite wireless career's website
2. Buy a prepaid phone (sim only if you can)
3. Important: Ask to port your number during checkout

Step 2: Port your prepaid number to Google Voice

Google voice lets you port your number from your current cell phone provider to Google voice. Since you already have a prepaid cell phone number from previous step you can use it to port your number to Google Voice. Watch the following video to find more about Google Voice number porting.

In order to port your number to Google Voice:

1. Go to voice.google.com
2. Click on settings (voice) in the top right corner
3. Click on Add/port number. You shall see the following screen
4. Select, I want to use my mobile number and follow the on-screen instructions.

Step 3: Use Google Voice as home phone

Once you have ported your number to Google Voice just add your cell phone or any other number as a forwarding address to make sure that the porting works.

Next, read our post that explains how to get a free home phone using a Google Voice number. You should be able to set it up without any hassle. 

This is the easiest way to get a Google voice number. There are a few hidden advantages of this method:

• Your number, with your ObiHai setup, can be used from anywhere in the world.
• If you move again you do not need to worry about moving your number.
• You get unlimited free phone calls to USA and Canada.
• If you want to ring multiple phones you can do that too. For instance, you can have your home and work phone ring at the same time.