I thought that with all the time I’ve spent writing about the advantages of TracFone and Net10, there might be some people that decide they want to switch from one to the other, or from a different carrier to one of those two. So I thought I’d write a post with a few tips on how to do that best.
I recently ported a number from TracFone service to Net10. I was very nervous that something would get messed up and my number would get lost, but it actually went very smoothly. In my case, I went from a TracFone GSM phone to a Net10 GSM phone, and the underlying carrier on each phone was AT&T, so that certainly made my port an easy one. But I was very pleased that it was done in less than an hour.
One important thing to point out before I go any further, though, is that minutes and service days are NOT transferrable between these two brands. So if you have a lot of minutes and/or days of service left on your current phone, I’d advise you to use up those minutes with your current service before switching to another provider.
Once you are ready to make the switch, though, here are few basic tips to help you out:
- As I alluded to above, a port will go most smoothly if the underlying carrier is the same for the old and the new phone (i.e. your old phone has an AT&T SIM card, and so does the new one). Switching from GSM to CDMA, or vice versa, will take a little longer (perhaps a couple of days).
- Don’t activate your new phone until you are ready to port. Porting to a phone that’s already active will make the process more complicated.
- In my experience it’s best to use TracFone’s or Net10’s website to initiate the port. If necessary, you can call Tech Support once the port is initiated, but in most cases it will go through without a problem.
- My friend Jim, who is as knowledgeable about TracFone and Net10 as anyone I know, has put together a step-by-step tutorial, complete with screen shots of the steps, for porting to TracFone. His tutorial is actually designed for the purpose of porting an inactive TracFone number to a new TracFone, which is another discussion for another time. But the basics are the same whether you are porting to TracFone or Net10, from one of those two companies or another provider entirely. Here’s a link to Jim’s tutorial:
I hope you’ve found these tips helpful in case you need to port your number or are considering a switch to TracFone or Net10. If you have any suggestions or questions on this article, please share them in the comments section. Thanks!
When I made my decision to switch over to Tracfone I wanted to take my number with me. I was able to port my number over from Cricket to Tracfone within an hour without any trouble.
I’ve been with Tracfone for several years, have ported several times, with results across the whole spectrum.
My first time I ported my wife’s number from Alltel to Tracfone, and it couldn’t have gone smoother. If memory serves the Tracfone was working before I got off the phone with them.
Later when I bought my first Tracfone, they tried numerous times but could never get me a number that was local for my area. They finally sent me a new sim card, but still couldn’t get a good number. Eventually they sent me a different phone that didn’t use a sim card, and then were able to get me a good number. All this went on for a couple of weeks.
After getting a good number, sometime later I bought a new phone that did use a sim card, and was able to port to it with no problem.
My latest port has been problematic. Just went from a Motorola W370 to a W376, but it took several days for the new phone to become usable. But of course my old phone became unusable immediately. And the new one has had problems dropping service where my old one never did. After reading some of your posts was able to determine that my old phone had an AT&T sim card, while the new one has a T-Mobile card. Finally convinced Tracfone to send me an AT&T card for it, haven’t received it yet but hopefully that will fix that problem.
I really enjoy reading your posts, keep up the good work.
This is such a great service!
I had been thinking about changing over to Net10 for a while.
About a month a go I lost my bag with all my life in it.
so having to get a new phone anyway I did the swap,
and to my great satisfaction it was sorted out very quickly.
My misfortune did however lead me on to Net10 and only having to pay $15 for activation and minutes is realy great.
I had just the opposite experience with Net10 and Tracfone. I’d been a Tracfone customer for years and had previously ported a number from Verizon to Tracfone and then to Net10. My wife had a Net10 account but wanted to move to Tracfone. When I initiated the port of her number from Net10 to Tracfone, (via the website), I didn’t anticipate any problems, especially with their being the same company. Not so. Instead of porting the mobile number, they ported my land line from AT&T. I’ve had that number for 15 years and both my DSL and satellite TV used that line. That was going to be a problem for me. I called Tracfone who told me to call AT&T and back and forth. Tracfone would tell me that AT&T would not provide them with what they needed to perform the port, and AT&T had no record of communications from Tracfone regarding the issue. Finally Tracfone let me speak to “Andre”, a porting specialist (?). He gave me very specific instructions on what he needed from me, and from AT&T. We both followed those instructions exactly, and set out to wait the 10 business days (again) for the port to happen. On day 9 I got an email from AT&T saying the port could not be completed and to please call Tracfone. I did so again and of course they told me to call AT&T. I called AT&T and after about an hour they discovered that Tracfone had refused to port the number back to AT&T, and had no intentions of doing so.
This all cost me about 12 hours worth of time, spent on the phone and web, for a mistake that Tracfone made. Their support people were not helpful nor knowledgeable (with the exception of Andre) and were obviously reading from a script. I was never allowed to speak to a supervisor or manager. AT&T however was very helpful through the whole affair. Their people were empowered to take action and access records, they knew the TeleCom laws regarding the issue, and were very pleasant. When I ended up having to order new services from them, they knocked off all kinds of money, in the form of Visa gift cards, and I got my service in two days.
I never had any issues with Tracfone until the the support moved from South Asia (I don’t know if America Movil owned them at this point) to Central America.
PSquared – wow, that sounds like a terrible experience. I’m sorry you had to go through it. One thing I don’t understand, though, is how in the world they even got your landline number in the first place. If you were going from Net10 to Trac, your landline number shouldn’t have been involved at all. Do you have any idea as to why they would even have included your landline in the port? That is really confusing to me.
pbushx2,
I had an online account with Tracfone that I used to buy airtime. My landline was required for registration.
To follow up, finally received new AT&T sim card today and got my tracfone working right again.
I thought (mistakenly) that when I ordered a new Tracfone from their website, since I was a customer already they would send me a phone for the same carrier I had already. I had a W370 and was on AT&T, bought a W376 and they sent me one with T-Mobile sim card.
At the time I didn’t realize the difference (didn’t know how to tell the difference in sim cards until reading some of the posts here). I wondered why it took so long to activate my new phone, now I understand, because what happened is they ported my number from AT&T to T-Mobile when I activated the new phone. Then when I finally figured out why my service was so terrible on the new phone and convinced them to send me a new AT&T sim card, they had to port my number again, from T-Mobile back to AT&T. Each port took several days.
On top of that, when they first agreed to send the new sim card, I waited several days and when it never came finally called them again and found that they had never sent it, had to go thru the whole thing again.
Next time I buy a Tracfone I will try to find out first whose sim card is in it, not sure if that info is available up front though. They always want zip code to determine what’s available for the area, in my case this is obviously not the way to decide, as they seem to think AT&T and T-Mobile have equivalent coverage in my zip code area, but the phone was almost useless when it was on T-Mobile. The network was just in and out all the time. On AT&T it is rock-solid.
My only problem now is I can’t send MMS to my computer (this did work on T-Mobile), makes camera pretty much useless. But not sure it’s worth the trouble to try and fix, the camera is not that great anyway.
Chas – there is a way to find out before you order which type of SIM their going to send you. It’s actually included in the URL of the phone order page. I’ll have to do a post on it sometime soon here.
Also, they SHOULD be able to get your MMS working again, but as you said it might not be worth the hassle. When a switch is made from T-Mobile to AT&T, or the other way around, this sometimes seems to screw up the data services (web and mms). Is your web currently working correctly with the ATT sim?
pbush, thanks for reply. I hadn’t tried my web browser since changing the sim, and you’re right, it doesn’t work either, finally says can’t connect to server after several minutes. Both it and the MMS go thru the motions (and deduct the minutes) but are never successful, MMS finally gives an error after several minutes and says to retry. I’ve wasted quite a few minutes with these already, any suggestions on the best approach to getting the problem fixed?
Chas – I would call customer service and explain the problem. Also explain that you’ve lost a lot of minutes. They’ll hopefully give you some free minutes to compensate for the lost time, and also they’ll probably tell you they need 48 hours to fix the problem. Be sure to get a case number from them, in case 48 hours go by and the problem isn’t fixed. Then you can call back and give them the case number so you don’t have to start all over.
I was looking through the tutorial and I was wondering, how do I know what network was the carrier for my tracfone? I am purchasing a phone from Net10 and wanted to transfer my tracfone number. Any advice on determining that?
Thanks
Jill-
TracFone uses AT&T, T-Mobile, Alltel, and Verizon, as far as I know.
If your phone has a sim card, it is either ATT or T-mo. Read the SIM serial number from the prepaid menu – if it starts with 890141, you have AT&T. If it is 890126, you have t-mobile.
If your phone does not have a sim card, you are on Verizon or ATT. I think that the way to figure out which carrier you have is to dial *228. It’s been a while since I tried this, but I think that you will then hear a message indicating the carrier you are using.
Hey, I’ve had a tracfone for like 3 years, and have ported my number from tracfone to tracfone 3 times, when new phone came out. Now I’ve got a net 10 phone, and I’m waiting for the port to complete from tracfone to that. Tracfone always took like 30 mins to complete, and I’m on DAY 3 with this one. Why is it taking so long? Also, I am schedualed to ship with the army in a few days, whats the average port time for this, as I need it done before I go. Thanks.
The problem could be due to a variety of factors, but my best guess is that you are either going from CDMA to GSM, GSM to CDMA, or from one GSM SIM type to the other. If this sounds like a bunch of gobbledy-gook to you, it is probably most efficient to deal directly with Net10’s support department. Here’s a post I did a few weeks ago about getting fast customer service/tech support:
http://pbush14.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/tracphone-support/
I’m wondering what sort of complications there may be when porting a (landline) number to a TracFone that’s already been activated. I’ll be getting my first TracFone soon, and would like to try it out for a few days before porting my number and giving up my current service. Thanks for any info!
Greg,
Honestly, I’ve never attempted the landline port. I’ve heard of people doing it, but never done so myself. I would be extremely cautious to make sure the number doesn’t get lost, especially if it’s one you’ve had for a while.
If you have a GSM TRacFone that’s already been activated, you’ll need to get a new SIM card, which TracFone will send you for free.
It’s probably easiest to start with a new, unactivated phone and begin the port that way. There are fewer complications that way.
Also, please be SURE that you’ll be getting a good deal by making this switch. Some people don’t realize how much they really use their landline. TracFone is really best for people that use under 150 minutes per month; Net10 is better for 150-300 minutes per month, and anything over that I recommend the new Straight Talk service.
I want to purchase “regular” AT&T cell phone service and give up my Tracphone service (which I’ve had for 5+ years). I would like to keep my Tracphone number and transfer it to this new AT&T cell phone service. AT&T tells me this can’t be done as Tracphone “owns” the Tracphone telephone numbers and won’t let them be transferred to another carrier. Is this right? If not, what do I need to do? Thanks.