All the details on our brand new number porting experience
We know that porting numbers from carrier to carrier can be difficult. It’s often unpredictable, and can be a major source of stress when you’re bringing new customers onboard or strategically migrating voice and messaging traffic. We at Bandwidth have spent years removing obstacles from the porting process – first, by creating the only team in the industry dedicated to resolving porting hold-ups, and then by making it predictable and programmable, allowing our customers to dictate the date and time their ports could go live.
But that wasn’t good enough for us. We wanted to make porting numbers to Bandwidth even easier. Even faster. Even smarter. And yes… even happier.
Bandwidth is proud to announce the launch of our new phone number porting experience, with features that make porting hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of numbers absolutely painless.
Now, porting is painless for everyone
We’re especially excited to see the benefits of our new experience spread across multiple industries with this roll-out. Bandwidth serves a unique and varied market, and we’ve kept that in mind as we scoped out and planned our new approach to porting. Here are just a few examples of how our new porting experience will change the game for our customers:
Software product owners will be able to seamlessly integrate with Bandwidth’s porting API, allowing their customers to port over 20,000 numbers in one fell swoop to Bandwidth’s platform as they get up and running.
VoIP professionals who choose Bandwidth for their core network capabilities will be able to coordinate port dates and times from multiple carriers, instead of individually project managing separate port requests per losing carrier.
The updates will also ease migration frustrations for enterprise IT professionals who may be migrating SIP services to a cloud communications platform. Porting pains are often the largest hassle and biggest time commitment in these migrations. Bandwidth’s updates will give them complete control of the porting process, allowing them to migrate individual offices, departments, or entire campuses with ease and predictability.
Porting in bulk, across carriers is easy and fast
In our previous experience, ports were limited to 999 numbers per single losing carrier, which meant you had to port each carrier separately. This made project management a hassle for customers who are porting large amounts of new numbers, or migrating large offices and often required a ticket for manual processing. With our new bulk porting options, you can port an unlimited amount of losing carriers at once in one single submission—we take care of everything on the back end, removing the friction. Because duplicative work is silly.
And what would bulk porting be without the bulk? We’ve upped how many numbers you can port at one time from a single losing carrier. Instead of 999 numbers, now you can port 5,000 numbers per losing carrier!
On top of that, we’ve also made checking number portability easier and faster than ever, as we launched the ability to check portability for up to 20,000 numbers at once (up from 999) across carriers. Checking portability up front ultimately reduces the amount of orders that are rejected during the porting process, so the increase will allow you to get in front of problem areas faster and en masse.
A redesigned, intuitive user interface
Not everyone needs to port numbers all day long, or offer up the ability for their customers to submit port orders via our API. That’s why we wanted to spend a significant amount of time perfecting our own user interface for those customers who only need to port numbers once a month or a few times a year. Those few times a year often come with large blocks of numbers, or mission-critical projects – and we know that making the process easy and intuitive goes a long way. We’ve taken your feedback to include features like:
The ability to drag and drop individual port orders in and out of a bulk order, eliminating the need to re-do the whole order to submit an outlier separately.
Choose when your port goes live, right down to the minute, by selecting your Firm Order Commitment (FOC) date for all losing carriers.
Track and monitor the progress of your port order.
Automatically save port orders as drafts, meaning you won’t lose your order if you’re logged out or lose internet connectivity.
Streamlined, easy to understand error codes help to explain why port orders may be rejected from losing carriers, reducing repeat rejections and enabling you to keep moving fast
Replacement billing telephone numbers aren’t a hassle anymore
When we looked into the hurdles our customers experienced while porting, it was shocking to discover that about 6% of order rejections are related to billing telephone numbers (BTNs). Why? Historically, if you needed to port your main telephone line (often the same as your billing number), your port would be rejected as the losing carrier needs a way to contact you for billing issues. As a result, the losing carrier would reach out to our porting team to try to resolve the problem, adding time and another layer of communications to the process. We set out to change that. In our new porting experience you can proactively add replacement BTNs to each order, getting ahead of this problem and reducing time spent in resolution. With this new option we expect BTN-related order rejections to drop by at least 50%.
So when can I try all these fancy new features?
Now! After early testing from some helpful customers, we’re ready to roll the new Bandwidth porting experience out to all of our customers. Log in to your dashboard and check it out in all its glory. Still have questions about porting? Reach out to one of our experts or check the support guide for more information.
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