Any experience with parking a cell phone number for extended period?

Parent Cafe
1

<p>My daughter will be leaving the end of August for Denmark to begin her master’s program. She will not be using her iphone while there, so she will suspend her service with her carrier.</p>

<p>She would like to keep her cell phone number to reuse when she returns to the US, and there are services that provide a parking service for a monthly fee. It’s difficult to ascertain how dependable these services are just by perusing their websites.</p>

<p>Does anyone have any experience with doing this? Any advice you would care to share?</p>

2

<p>The first step I would take, is call her present carrier and see what arrangements they would make.
I betcha they would be accommodating rather than lose money to another service.</p>

3

<p>Or if you have a family plan, you might be able to add her line for $5/mo, and then just transfer when she comes back.</p>

4

<p>Our cell phone carrier only allows us to suspend services for six months. She will be gone for twenty two months. The fee to suspend is considerable higher than the fee to park the number.</p>

5

<p>We have tmobile, and they enabled us to suspend service on S’s cell for a year while he was in France and keep the number. I have no idea how much, if anything, it cost. H handles that stuff.</p>

6

<p>When I went abroad in college, I traded in my regular phone for a global phone with the same number. I retained both physical phones, but only one had service. It was good to have the global phone because it meant that as soon as I got to whatever country I was going to, I could make a phone call to my parents, my house mates in France, or anyone relevant, to say I’d touched down and was safe. The same phone worked all over France (from Paris to way out in Brittany) in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Poland, Greece (in Athens and on a nearby island), Cyprus, Morocco (both in Marrakesh and pretty far into the Atlas Mountains), Turkey, Ukraine. I think it’s great for safety. When I got back, we simply switched the service again, so that my home phone had service while the global phone sat in a drawer somewhere.</p>

<p>My family has also parked numbers by adding a tablet to the plan and assigning that number to the tablet. They only did this because the plan they were on allowed them to add a tablet cheaply and somehow doing this helped me get a new iPhone sooner.</p>

<p>We have Verizon and carried out these transactions through them.</p>

7

<p>Perhaps transfer the number to one of the cheap prepaid services listed here, giving it the minimum refill needed to maintain the service: <a href=“Prepaid Compare”>http://www.cellguru.net/prepaid_compare.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;