How to Switch Cell Phone Carriers

Switching to a new cell service can seem intimidating, but for once in telecom the rules are on your side: Firing your current provider and taking not just your business but also your phone number elsewhere is not merely your privilege but your right. This didn’t happen by accident: It took sustained customer advocacy before the US government mandated wireless number portability. As a result, moving your number should be easy. But taking your phone from one carrier to another can bring up compatibility issues.

Moving numbers

As this FCC checklist spells out, it's easy to port your number from your current carrier. Here’s how:

1. Don’t cancel your old service before you begin porting your number—the process works only if the number is currently active.

2. Sign in to your current account and get your account number, your account PIN (if it exists), and your billing address. If you can’t find the PIN in whatever password manager you use—even if it’s just Safari or Chrome’s autofill—you may need to reset it.

3. Sign up with your new service, tell the carrier you want to port your number, and provide that sign-in info. Most carrier websites have easy-to-follow steps to walk you through this.

4. Wait for your number to move to the new service—usually it takes just a few hours.

5. Cancel service with your old carrier; porting your number sometimes cancels it automatically.

That last step can require paying off a balance on your phone, but your new service may pay for that.

Although it’s possible for the new service to charge a fee to port over your number, you’re likely to see that only in unusual cases such as moving a number to Google Voice (for which Google charges $20) or porting one to an Internet-calling service ($40 with Ooma).

It should take only an hour or so for your number to port over once you've requested that, as long as you provide the exact details of the account you're closing.¹ If the process takes longer, check in with your new carrier to see if the company is missing any info it needs.

If you’re using your mobile number to get two-factor authentication codes for any online accounts, now is a great time to switch to an app-based 2FA option such as Google Authenticator, Authy, or the verification mechanisms built into apps for social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Not only will your SMS codes not work while your number is being ported over, but getting codes via SMS is less secure than using an app, since attackers have been known to port victims' numbers against their will to a phone they control in order to intercept two-factor tokens.

Making sure your phone works

Porting your number is actually the easy part. You also have to make sure your existing phone will continue to work—if not, you’ll have to buy a new one. Your checklist:

1. See if your current phone will work on your new service by checking either its hardware ID number or its model number against a database at your new service’s site or on the website Will My Phone Work.

2. Verify that it can use all of your new carrier's LTE frequencies.

3. Make sure you don’t owe your old carrier any installment payments and that your phone isn’t hardware-locked to your old carrier.

4. If you do owe your old carrier money, find out if your new carrier offers incentives to switch, and if so, whether it's better to trade in your old phone or keep it on the new carrier.

Step one is the trickiest. The most direct way to check your phone’s compatibility is via its IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number. Look that up by typing “*#06#” in its phone app or by checking in the Android or iOS Settings app. Then plug that number into your new service’s site—see, for example, the bring-your-own-device pages for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

The most likely hangup is that your phone lands on the wrong side of the US wireless industry’s wireless-standards schism: GSM (Global System for Mobile), the standard in most of the world, versus CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). AT&T and T-Mobile use the former; Verizon and Sprint use the latter. Some phones can work on any carrier, but many don't support the right radios and LTE bands for every carrier.

Here’s how the four carriers, plus their separate prepaid brands and major resellers, break down on this front:

Many phones work with both GSM and CDMA, but that’s no guarantee—especially among phones sold directly to customers. For example, the Nokia 6.1, which tops our list of budget Android phones, lacks CDMA radios, so it doesn't work on Sprint or Verizon.

Number transfers are easier overall in a GSM-to-GSM switch, since you simply need to take your new service’s SIM card and pop it into your old phone. If you move to Verizon or Sprint service, you may also need to activate your phone online so that your new carrier can provision it for the network.

A phone that can get online on a new service may do so poorly if it doesn’t use the right LTE bands. A third-party resource, Will My Phone Work, can cite the exact bands your phone supports. But because you can’t plug in a phone’s IMEI there, you have to provide its exact model number, which can get confusing with phones sold through multiple carriers such as Apple’s growing family of iPhones.

If you still owe money to your old carrier for your phone, you won’t be able to take it to a new carrier until you pay it off. Verizon sells its phones unlocked, though that doesn't necessarily mean they're compatible with every carrier, and if you cancel service you’ll have to pay off your remaining balance. That’s not the case for iPhones and Pixel phones bought from Apple and Google on their installment-payment plans, which aren’t tied to any carrier’s billing.

Carrier incentive packages

If all four nationwide carriers have coverage that works for you—we realize that won’t apply in many cases—and your phone will work equally well on all four, bear in mind that Sprint and T-Mobile offer much better incentives to customers switching from other carriers.

If you owe an installment-payment balance on a phone, T-Mobile will pay up to $650 of that. But since that deal’s conditions require you to turn in that phone and buy a new one from T-Mobile, you may want to keep the old device instead if it supports T-Mobile’s LTE bands. Both the early-termination fee and phone-payment payouts come in the form of a prepaid debit card.

Sprint will also pay your remaining phone balance (subject to your then turning in the phone and getting a new one from Sprint), but we generally don't advise switching to Sprint.

AT&T and Verizon don't usually offer incentives to switch. Prepaid services and resellers typically don't either, although for most of those services, cheaper pricing is the incentive—and if you can keep both your phone number and your phone after switching, that may be enough.

Footnotes

1. This stands in distinct contrast to all the industry angst over the November 2003 onset of the Federal Communications Commission’s number-portability mandate. Jump back.

Sources

1. Wireless Local Number Portability Checklist, Federal Communications Commission, November 19, 2015

2. Dave Andersen, Mobile performance across the United States in the first half of 2018, RootMetrics, July 25, 2018