Lisa has been using Republic Wireless for about six months now and, truth be told, it just hasn't been working out for her.  We love the idea of Republic Wireless and we certainly loved the price but in our area it just couldn't deliver a decent experience while Lisa roamed around for work.

Prior to switching to Republic we had been using AT&T but it was costing us a small fortune each month.  Going to Republic cut our bill by more than half!  However, AT&T had a far better coverage area near us than Republic (who uses the Spring network).  Verizon also has pretty poor coverage in most of the places Lisa has to travel for work so AT&T seemed to be the only choice for Lisa when we decided to quit Republic.

Then I heard about Cricket.  Cricket is a cheaper way of using the AT&T network.  Basically, for unlimited text, voice, and 10GB of data it is about $60 and that includes all the taxes and fees.  It's a pretty good option considering the same deal through AT&T was going to be well over $100/month.

So I convinced Lisa to switch from Republic to Cricket.  However, there was one requirement - she had to be able to port her number.  AT&T wouldn't release her number when she switched to Republic and the process of switching numbers was a huge pain in the ass.

Republic registers your phone numbers as a land-line because they use a Voice Over IP (VOIP) system to provide their unique service.  It turns out Crickets automated number transfer system can't handle land-line to cellular.  Thus, you need to work take an intermediary step in order to get your number to cricket.

I bought Lisa the new 2014 Moto X which works on the AT&T network to start with.  Next I needed to port her number to a different carrier that could support land-line to cellular but I couldn't get locked into some contractual thing.  The trick was going to AT&T and buying their Go Phone Starter Pack ($25).  They were then able to port my number to from Republic to AT&T.  It takes a few days because it isn't cellular to cellular but, once it finished processing, I could then go to Cricket.

Not so fast!

Cricket has a webform you have to fill out in order to switch your number and one of the required fields is last four digits of your social security number.  They use this number, along with a bunch of other fields such as your AT&T account number and PIN, to authorize the number port.  However, AT&T doesn't collect a social security number when setting up a Go Phone service.  Thus, when Cricket tries to match all the numbers the website fails and reports that your PIN is invalid - even when it isn't - the problem is the last four of your social security number.

Calling AT&T won't help and calling Cricket won't help either.  Instead you have to enter 0000 as your last four numbers.  Neither Cricket nor AT&T seems to know this.  I got lucky and found it as a possible suggestion on a forum.

Once I figured this out the port took a few seconds to a minute at the most and the MotoX was on the Cricket network and her phone rang when I dialed her ported number.

#cellular-service #cricket #att #verizon #republic-wireless #sprint