See also personal phone numbers, which are now "portable" and thus "required for every single identity verification you will ever perform", without being regulated, which means your identity is one $30 bill autopayment or one dodgy MVNO customer service interaction from being lost forever.
What if you need to stop paying for a phone bill entirely though? Maybe you're living paycheck to paycheck and money is just too tight this month. That's what I think GP was talking about.
Is it possible to "park" your phone number until you can start a new plan?
It's now possible. I work for a mvno that was recently acquired. We have a $5 pause plan. It has no data, voice or text, it just keeps your line active.
Germany is not exactly known for cheap plans, but apparently it’s worse in the US and you can only get comparable plans if you pay yearly, which I guess might just barely make a $5 parking contract worth it.
This wouldn't be surprising. It's sad they've let it atrophy the way that they have. My understanding is that they purchased it to train their digital assistant on the voicemails (where we would correct the transcripts for free)
Though AFAIK there's no law or contract term preventing Google from starting to charge a monthly fee in the future.
And after some time — for me it was 5+ years, porting from a baby Bell land line to a postpaid T-Mobile family plan for a couple years and then to Google Voice — your number will be tarred and feathered as a "VoIP" number and rejected for identity verification by some parties until it's ported back to a paid service (again, after some time).
Even so, it's nice that Google lets me keep the number I was born with for $0/month for as long as it lasts.
Google has already killed my sister's business's Enterprise Workspace plan, because they decided to change their mind, and make "unlimited storage" not a thing. She was paying $200/month and they now wanted $1,600/month. I decided to build a NAS for her instead.
This is despite written emails from their support confirming the use case (videography) and storage needs were suitable, and a written statement that she is "permanently grandfathered" once Google stopped offering the plan to new customers.
To make matters worse, they gave her 30 days to download all data before everything would be deleted permanently. This is how Google treats "enterprise" customers.
> your number will be tarred and feathered as a "VoIP" number and rejected for identity verification by some parties until it's ported back to a paid service (again, after some time).
Where things get fun is when Google Voice IS your paid service (e.g. google fiber's phone service, popular with a certain demographic that used POTS for most their life and want to continue having a similarly behaving service).
You can port your number to NumberBarn and park it for $2/month. Other services probably exist, but I signed up to NumberBarn ages ago and haven't had any issues the handful of times I've used them.
Lose access to your number by any category of errors on your part or your carrier's part, and see what happens.
They're not tied to your person with much more permanency than a DHCP IP address. There's no process to verify your identity or recover your number or help you regain your accounts. The actual process for migrating your number is "Sign up with this other brand you've never tried before and tell them to politely ask your former brand to release the number to them".
If I lose my phone to a trash compactor, the process to change anything in my phone carrier account with regard to SIM cards is going to forward things to my Gmail account, which at random times for random reasons is going to begin to demand 2 factor identification for logging in on a new device via texting my phone number.
There are all sorts of crazy scenarios that can arise with double binds like this.
If we had a resilient authoritative identity verification (say, the DMV, or US Passport Office), or if we had a diverse variety of low-trust identity factors that we could check multiple aspects of ("text my mother" / "Here's a bill showing my address" / "here's a video of my phase saying my phone number"), there would be a way out, but all of corporate America heard "2fa is required for security now" and said "So we just text them right?"
That makes your phone not "another thing that people can use to talk to you in circumstances when you're not accessible", which the FCC's portability plan was maybe sufficient for, but a fragile single point of failure for your entire identity.
I'd assume regulated in the sense of identity verification and transactions. There's no legal basis for needing a north American phone number, but good luck with any US obligations if you are without one.
I’m wondering how feasible would it be to just use a SIM card from another country (e.g. in Estonia, you can get a prepaid card for 1 € that works in EU roaming just fine, with domestic-like prices on local calls). How many services in Germany require you to use specifically German number?
It depends of course how far you are. I used to use an orange Spain SIM before the EU roaming deal because they had free roaming on sister networks. But I didn't go there so much.
