60,000 Take Home Numbers Wireless

from the cut-the-cord dept

While most stories about wireless local number portability in the US focused on who was switching between which wireless carriers (and what problems they were having), the fact that you could also take your home number and port it over to your mobile phone received much less coverage. Now, it turns out that about 60,000 people took advantage of this rule and took their home landline wireless. Not a huge number, but still noteworthy (and some say the numbers would be much higher without all these glitches). Wireless carriers also claim (though, without evidence) that the number of wireline customers requesting to move a number is growing - so it may simply be that many people didn't realize they could do this. Of course, the people who are most likely to be interested in ditching a landline probably already have a mobile phone - so it's not clear they really need to port their landline number over. I'm also curious how many of those 60,000 were Manhattan residents who were drooling over a coveted (and previously unavailable) status-symbol 212 mobile phone number.