I was given my nephew’s new street address today, and I realized he’s too young to remember when that would have been accompanied by “and his new telephone number is…”
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Comics I Don't Understand 
We DID change our email address when we moved to FL, but the old one still works so maybe we needn’t have done so. At least when we used to change phone numbers, a recording with the new number made transferring easier than changing one’s email address.
https://xkcd.com/1129/
A neighbour of mine apparently only keeps her landline because she really really likes the phone she has. I offered to loan her my bluetooth telephone adaptor thingy (it lets you hook phones up to your cell phone via bluetooth. The most useful part is that you can, in theory, hook it into your entire home’s phone system, so that you can still have a home phone while only paying for a cell phone.) She realised that the only people who currently call her home phone are of an age were of course you periodically have to update people’s phone numbers, so if she did make the change it would go smoothly.
(I’m of an age where you would get someone’s new phone number, but only if they moved cities, because you could move your number with you locally, and I’m not sure how far locally stretched, because my city was an entire area code.)
Christine – we could keep our phone number when we moved to this house as our apartment, while in a different community, was only about 10 blocks away so it was the same area. (When we look out our front windows we are looking at the other community – and they did not assign house numbers in both communities the same.)
However the area code covers a much larger area. It originally covered 2 counties – the majority of area of Long Island. Now it covers one county. The other county changed their area code some time ago, and a couple of years ago they got a second, overlay area code. If I had my own telephone number when I lived with my parents, I would not have been able to transfer it to our apartment or house, about 10 miles away.
In general now though one can keep their phone number wherever they move. We are all charged a monthly fee as part of our telephone billing to allow this. It is the same thing that allows house numbers to become cell phone numbers (and vice versa) or to transfer cell numbers from one company to another.
Heck, if I wanted to call my sister while she was traveling to Iceland (as she is right now) I could if I paid for International service on a cell phone or long distance on our house phone just by dialing her regular cell phone number. She and my niece (not her daughter, I have another sister) may have even met up using their cell phones while niece changed planes and spent a day in Iceland at the same time. Yes, calling a US phone number from another one while in another country. (Well, I presume one can.)
Who could have dreamed it back when I was not allowed to call my cousin who lived in Queens County, NYC from my home in the adjacent Nassau County because “what do you think we are made of – money?” per my parents. Unfortunately I still think this way. I have a college friend who moved to Virginia. Maybe 10 years ago I forgot to send her a birthday card and was upset. Robert told me to call her. “Long distance? To Virginia? Mom wouldn’t let me call her at her parents’ house in Suffolk County when she was home during the summer.” Yes, I did call her.
We had a weird situation during the brief period AFTER people were allowed to keep their cell phone numbers even after leaving the area, but BEFORE the concept of long-distance charges on landlines disappeared.
My son’s best friend came from Texas, and his phone still had a Texas area code. He lived two blocks away but I had to remind my son not to call his friend’s cell phone using our landline, because the phone company considered it a call to Texas.
Meryl A – We have to pay around 25 cents/minute to call with our international traveller package. (Only applies to calls within the country we currently are in, or back to Canada.) But at least, if I’m fast enough in remembering to take ti off, we only have to pay for part of the month. (It’s pro-rated from when I activate it, but if it’s still active at the start of the new billing cycle I have to pay for the whole month. We seem to have a lot of travel that returns a day before the new cycle, meaning that in theory I could cancel it in time, so I feel bad when I don’t)
I have actually never transferred a landline, although this is because I never kept one during undergrad (just got a new number every term), and we kept our “starter” apartment for quite a while. We had a landline up until recently. I just have memories of my mom telling me that the exchange used to be something you could use to tell where the number was from, but that they didn’t do that anymore.
CIDU Bill – I remember getting horribly confused about what was a local call vs a long-distance one with an out of area cell phone. It was really confusing. And if there were two cell phones in the same out-of-area location it was more complicated, and there were potentially charges for receiving calls, and I’m so glad they got rid of that.
I have NEVER been able to transfer my phone number when moving, despite paying that stupid tax — every single time there was a “reason” why it couldn’t work — oh, you’re changing from Verizon to Optimum, you can’t port the number that way, you’d have to first sign up for Verizon in your new place, transfer the number (all for a “convenient” fee, of course — what’s that tax for again?) to the new Verizon service, THEN move the service to Optimum in the new place. When I moved across town in Philadelphia, I was told that because the new place was on a different CO the number couldn’t move from one CO to another, only within a CO — so what’s the point of the tax again? Within a CO it’s obviously easy to port a number, its the between COs that the tax was paying for, because that was a little harder before they virtualized it all.
A pox on all their houses…
I really get the feeling that Optimum, Verizon et al WANT people to drop their landlines.
Landline? Did someone mention landline??
Definitely the phone companies want to get rid of traditional copper landlines.
land line comments….I live right on the edge of cell service so a land line is necessary, can’t get away from it and our only non satellite internet option is DSL from the phone company so that make it even more necessary. My phone prefix is a local call to a very small area but part of that area is local to a larger area of a different phone company. When I get a cell phone, it is fun to explain to the cell person that it needs to have one of a limited number of prefixes for the new cell number so it can be called for free from my home land line. Most don’t get that calling a cell can be long distance on land lines.
You can use Google Voice to call. When I figured that out, I dropped long-distance service from my landline.
Lark -my mom and my sister both switched Verizon to Cablevision/Optimum no problem. SIL was forced to make the change after Verizon decided not to replace the wires to her house after Hurricane Sandy. They all kept their former telephone numbers.
Brian in STL – When the long distance was split off, we did not take any long distance service. If we needed to make a long distance call, before my cell phone had unlimited calling, we dialed a 5 digit code for a long distance carrier for that call. We still use same when we need to fax something that is long distance. Mostly these days the landline is for incoming calls and we use my cell phone for outgoing local and other calls unless they are 800 (etc) free phone calls as our landline service does not come with any minutes and long distance calls are generally very rare.
And yes, they want to get rid of the copper wire lines. When there is a (rare) problem with our phone we have to make sure that even though they said they will not switch the service, they do not switch the service over. They had been leaving a junction( ?) box unlocked and open so that animals and rain could get it into it. I had to call several times before they sent someone to close and lock it.
Meryl: you can change service provider and keep your number as long as you don’t move; you can’t move and change at the same time and keep your number (which would be the most usual case, so again, what’s that #&$^ing tax for?) — you need to move, keeping the same service, then once established at your new place, change the service then, having shelled out for all sorts of startup, shutdown and convenience fees in the meanwhile for both old and new service (including a keep number fee!!), you can change service and keep the number…
I can’t imagine many terms that make me feel more compelled to smack somebody than “convenience fee”: what does that even mean, other than “a convenient way for us to get extra money out of you”?
Bill – we have to pay a surcharge to our cable company for broadcast channels and another for the general sports channels (not the special order one, the ones in the basic service). We don’t want the sports channels – but have to pay if we want other channels. We can get the broadcast channels on this new device we put in – called an antenna (so we can watch TV when, again, the cable is out), but even if we didn’t want them, we would have to have to pay the surcharge. I remember when they were required to give you the broadcast channels at no additional fee and that was most of the service one had.