VOIP Tech Chat → Question about DID's

I like Google Voice's number search. You can get a Google Voice number with any gmail account. Then, It's $3.00 to unlock the number so it can be ported to a VoIP provider. If you choose Anveo as the provider, the port-in is free, and the port occurs within a few hours.

I've done this to find two or more Vanity DIDs I wanted. $3 find a cool vanity DID is worth the cost.

Of course, OP, the DIDs available to these various providers are what they have available to them. So it might take time to find what you want. Anveo and GV can do these quick ports because they are both customers of Bandwidth.com.

Vitelity.com allows you to search for numbers. Most of theirs are from Level3.

Good Luck.

I have an obsession with phone numbers, so this question is near and dear to my heart.

As far as I know, there is no one site where you can search all numbers available for any carrier. There are sites which sell "vanity numbers", for example numbers that end with 4 identical digits like "3333" or even numbers that end in "0000". I have never bought a number from one of these sites, as they are quite expensive. Most numbers start at $300 or $400 and some are more than $10,000.

The new Anveo capability to search by area or code by rate center is very useful. Once the available numbers are displayed, you can just do a text search on the web page. It is a bit frustrating that it will only display the first 4000 numbers for a given area code or rate center.

The best site I have found for searching for phone numbers is Twilio. They recently added the capability to do wild card searches. For example, a search for "314*****00" would find any number in the 314 area code which ends in 00. US and Canadian phone numbers cost $1 per month and $2 for a toll free number. But if I remember correctly, the minimum deposit to open an account is $20.

They do seem to allow searches on any country available which is quite an extensive list. I was easily able to search for a phone number in Brazil which ended in 00 and I could have purchased one for $3 per month. I also tried searching in Bulgaria, although the search turned up nothing. Perhaps they have no available numbers in Bulgaria at this moment.

My only complaint about the search is that it only displays 10 available numbers, seemingly randomly from their pool of available numbers. To check for any additional numbers you have to hit the refresh button which they display at the bottom of the screen, but this will often just redisplay the numbers which you have already seen.

Porting from Twilio has been mostly successful with some caveats. I ported 2 numbers to CallCentric without any problems. I simply uploaded a signed letter of agency and 2 screenshots from my Twilio account, showing the phone numbers and my address. The ports were scheduled within a few hours and completed in 4 to 5 business days. I have had no problems with the ported numbers.

Ports to Ring.to were a bit more problematic. Some went through without issues but a few we had to go back and forth on. Twilio is a prepaid service and does not record a billing address for the account. They seem to record their address in San Francisco as the billing address with the reseller they obtain the number from. I will give kudos to Ring.to's customer support for persevering on the last 2 ports even after I had given up. Those 2 ports are scheduled to complete tomorrow morning.

Google Voice does have decent search capability and seem to let you page through all the numbers available with in a certain area code, with or without an additional search string to match. It would be nice if GV let you at least specify that you wanted the search string to match at the end of the number. I have often thought about writing a Linux script to go through all the GV numbers for a given area code and filter out the ones that I want.

I have never had any luck find particularly good vanity numbers on GV. I get the feeling that GV numbers get picked over pretty quickly when new numbers get released. In all the numerous hours I have spent searching for numbers on GV, I have never found a number that ended in 000 for example.

There are a lot of sites that let you see numbers before buying, but not a lot of sites that actually let you input a certain number to see if it is available.

I have never had any luck find particularly good vanity numbers on GV.

Do you have to register on their site perhaps?

So unless there is someone who's figured out a way to game it better than I have, XYYY and XXXX suffixes are not up for grabs.

If you're seeking a very specific number, first try dialing it to see if it is in service with another telephone customer. If it is, obviously it is unavailable (unless you want to try buying it off the existing user.)

If the number is not in service then you can lookup which telecom carrier owns that number. Other members of this forum can direct you how to easily lookup which carrier owns the number. With that information you can call that carriers sales department and ask about establishing new service with them and if that phone number would be available.

OP: If you're seeking a very specific number, first try dialing it to see if it is in service with another telephone customer. If it is, obviously it is unavailable (unless you want to try buying it off the existing user.)

If the number is not in service then you can lookup which telecom carrier owns that number. Other members of this forum can direct you how to easily lookup which carrier owns the number. With that information you can call that carriers sales department and ask about establishing new service with them and if that phone number would be available.

If you obtain it, you later can port it to another carrier if so desired.

How do I find out which carrier owns the number?