I wanted to share with all of my hard working surveyor friends another great feature of the online phone service, Google Voice – namely, number porting. Google Voice supports call forwarding and with this feature, you can port your existing phone number to your Google Voice account and enable forwarding all calls placed to that number to your home phone, mobile phone, and any other phone you might have at your disposal.

Using this feature you can keep the phone numbers that you and your contacts have memorized or at least saved, and in the process simplify your life a little. After all, that’s what technology is for…. to make our lives easier.

How Do I Port Google Voice to My Cellphone

Surveyors, I am not going to sit here and lie to you. Indeed, porting your mobile number to Google Voice is most likely going to lighten your wallet a bit, and personally, I would recommend just handing out the randomly generated number that Google gives you and forwarding it to all your other phones.

Nevertheless, I recognize that there are indeed situations where you have built a viable business around your mobile number(s) orperhaps you have kept your number for quite a few years and of course you don’t want to give it up yet, and in those cases porting your number becomes a necessity.

Porting can be done from the settings panel of your Google Voice home page, as shown below. (Google Voice is currently only available in the US).

The Cost of Porting

Porting your number over to Google Voice is going to run you a whopping $20. The whole process can take up to 24 hours to complete and once it is completed, your mobile service plan will be cancelled (do not cancel before you port your number). This means that you may run into early termination fees from your telephone carrier, which can get pretty pricey. But with Google Voice you will also have access to free and unlimited text messaging as well as advanced voicemail functions like transcribing and visual representations of your messages.

Success! After you have successfully ported your number and cancelled your existing service, you will need to acquire another plan and a new number. Then, use call forwarding to have all of your calls forwarded from your now familiar Google Voice number to your various phones.

If you need or want more information, Google has put together a help page describing the exact process of porting your number, it includes a helpful FAQ as well.