Can I transfer my carrier number to another vendor?
Yes, many Sense customers maintain another vendor for voice with Sense SMS-enabled numbers. If you elect to transfer your numbers to a new vendor, this critical event should be coordinated with Sense Support well in advance.
In Telecommunications, the voice owner of a telephone number has the ultimate authority to determine what other carriers will be allowed to enable SMS on their owned lines.
What happens when my lines port to a new vendor?
In roughly 9.5 times out of 10, a line port from one telecommunications vendor to another of a provisioned phone line will result in disablement and hosting loss of your Sense SMS Numbers.
Sense cannot prevent this from happening.
What should I do to prepare for a porting event?
Before you prepare for a porting event, be mindful of the following:
- Notify your voice vendor that Sense HQ will host SMS capabilities on your numbers after the port is completed.
- Please ensure that your new voice vendor supports 3rd party SMS hosting.
Note: On rare occasions, such as with Microsoft Teams, a voice carrier will not support 3rd party hosting of SMS capabilities. |
- Please ask your new account representative to ensure that your lines are in a state that will facilitate SMS hosting. However, many carriers allow hosting simply by disabling SMS settings on your phone numbers.
- In some cases, your new carrier may not release SMS hosting until they receive a Letter of Authorization (LOA) from Sense’s carrier. Your carrier must respond to that LOA by approving or denying it. However, if your carrier takes no action, Sense cannot take possession of SMS hosting. Your carrier has the ultimate final say on how quickly we can resume SMS enablement.
Tip: Please involve your carrier account representative at every step so we can best prepare to limit your downtime. Don’t hesitate to include us in communications with your carrier to assist. |
How should I notify Sense of a vendor change requiring a port?
Open a ticket with Sense support (support@sensehq.com) even if you don’t know your porting date. Include:
- SUBJ: Porting Lines to New Voice Vendor
- Include your new carrier
- Include your dedicated account representative and how we can reach them
- Include your port date (if you have it)
- Include your Customer Success Manager with Sense for their visibility as well
How much downtime should I prepare for?
Porting teams work weekdays and will generally schedule your port in the middle to end of the week between 8–11 am Pacific Standard Time. During the porting event, expect the following:
- Your lines will be down for voice and SMS for around 1-2 hours. Some carriers will work after hours for a fee, and you can engage your voice carrier if possible.
- You can expect to add another 1-4 hours for SMS enablement. However, it is critical that the steps above are completed and all stakeholders are prepared to meet this timeline.
Note: If your voice carrier is not prepared to quickly release SMS to our carrier after the port completes, this timeline will extend until that step is completed. This particular step is completely outside of our control. |
- In some fringe cases, reproducing your Sense phone numbers to 10-digit Long Code campaigns can extend this timeline by 24 business hours. However, proper prior planning reduces this risk to nearly 0. Regardless, we recommend you be prepared for up to 1.5 business days of downtime.
What can we do to minimize a complete workday outage?
Sense advises that you break your teams in two and work with your voice carrier to schedule two porting dates so half your teams run while the other half moves.
If that is not feasible, Sense can provision temporary numbers to work with while your port completes and we have regained SMS hosting.