parking a phone number
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
When I moved from Tokyo to Toronto I bought a phone number in Toronto in advance through a small Canadian company. They let me do things like forward phone calls and text messages from that virtual phone number to my real phone - which, because I had no phone, was a no-contract "burner" from 7-11. I eventually let that number go, because I got a smartphone again at some point.
When planning to move back to Tokyo I went back to that provider to park my Toronto number. I noticed that absolutely nothing had changed; the site still had the same rendering errors and the over all service was completely unchanged. I had to submit scanned paperwork to get my credit card on file. They do top-up billing which makes it hard for me to predict when I'll be charged or what I'm really paying. And I couldn't block spam text messages - a feature I'd discussed with the owner back in 2010.
And then I started having trouble with text-based authentication for login to some websites like the CRA and so on. I was getting lots of spam but wasn't able to get the one thing that I needed.
So I've switched to another provider. It's $2 instead of $3.50 a month, it allows outbound calls through the website for free (goodbye "Skype out"!), they have spam blockers that I can adjust, etc etc. One of their staff actively helped me weave through the weird roadblocks that the old provider was putting up around my transferring the number, and they agreed to bill me in advance for a year so I wouldn't pay twelve foreign currency fees on my credit card for monthly transactions. Because yes, it's based in the US. It pains me to say this, but when you need innovation where else are you going to wind up.