Many of us can name several people who use different cell phones for different occasions, but how about using same phone number working on several cell phones? Intrigued? Read along.

How does it work?

Basically, using one phone number in multiple cell phones is not as easy as wearing on different kinds of sweater, but many cell phone companies enable the use of more than one handset with the same phone number. So a person can conceivably carry an e-mail device like BlackBerry during work hours then all of a sudden switch to a slender flip phone at night. The process differs depending on the service provider. There are few minor limitations as to which handsets you will use interchangeably. However, the most important to remember is that each device you want to use needs to be part of your wireless company’s device lineup. For instance, a Sprint phone won’t work with a T-Mobile account and so on. There are actually many ways to work around this obstacle, but the process won’t appeal to most consumers.

Most of the nation’s biggest carriers like AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA permits their subscribers to move a phone number from handset to handset. But with Sprint Nextel Corp., only older phones in Sprint’s handset lineup can be swapped in this fashion. The process is the same with the customers of AT&T and T-Mobile, both of which use the globally dominant GSM technology for their cellular networks and phones.

With a GSM technology, a customer’s phone number and account information are stored on a SIM. SIM is a removable smart card about the size of a postage stamp that fits in a slot within the battery compartment. Moreover, the size of the card and the slot is identical on all GSM phones. Therefore, to use multiple phones, all a customer needs to do is remove the SIM from one phone and insert it into the back of another.

There will be few minor warning as you go along the process as the formatting of the SIM does vary in types of phone. For instance, if you take the SIM from a regular phone and insert it in a BlackBerry, you’d be able to make calls or access a mobile Web page but you wouldn’t be able to use it for the BlackBerry e-mail service.

On the other hand, in the case of Verizon Wireless, the process for switching phones is handled entirely online rather than on the phone itself. That is because Verizon’s service is supported by a technology called CDMA that doesn’t involve a SIM. Here, the user’s phone number and account information is stored within the device’s internal circuitry.

Therefore, to swap phones, a Verizon customer needs to register for online account access through the same portal that users can view or pay their monthly bills. On that Web site, theirs is an ‘Activate Phone’ link which will asks you to input the 11-digit code called an ESN for the device you’d like to work with your phone number. ESN on the other hand is unique to each handset – it can be found printed inside the battery compartment.

After all, the user needs to wait 10 minutes for the switch to work its way through Verizon’s systems, then after that you need to type in ‘228′ on the new phone and press send, this process will trigger an over-the-air activation for that handset. Now, to switch the phone number back to the original handset or to another handset, you’d go back to the web and repeat the process.

According to Verizon Wireless, customers who like to swap handsets may want to subscribe to Back-Up Assistant. It is a service that moves their contacts from one device to another for $1.99 per month.

Furthermore, Sprint also uses CDMA technology and offers a similar Web-based process to Verizon’s, but only with older phone models. As for the recent models equipped for Sprint’s Vision multimedia data services cannot be swapped online.

Related Posts

No related posts.