The downside of number porting.
Yesterday I was woken by an unsolicited text from an online bingo provider, not for the first time. Getting fed up with them I searched and found a number that I could forward them to that deals with spam.I duly forwarded the msg, and received a reply asking for the originator callerID. I had to tell them that it was sent from 000000, and expected to hear no more.
I have a new phone in addition and wanted to update the contacts so I know own number. I called my old phone number and found it was reported as "Temporarily Unavailable". I found I could send texts and make calls but not receive them.
Thinking the phone was faulty I swapped the SIM to another phone and now there was no signal at all. Back to the other phone and now no signal there either.
I checked the O2 status page, and it said all the network was fine.
I had a spare PAYG SIM on the same network, so I tried that and it worked fine. So I thought that it was the SIM with my main number that was faulty. I contacted my MobileSP to ask for my credit to be moved to the working SIM.
Then at 2am today I get a series of txt msgs on the 'dead' phone over a 30 min period. These turned out to be messages from yesterday, including test ones I had sent to myself.
So what did I learn. My current analysis is that the problem was caused by using a 'Ported Number' on the SIM
The working SIM is on the same network, but with a 'native' number. OFCOM documents indicate that there may be routing changes underway at the moment.
If this is the cause then maybe porting your number is not a good move, not only does any spam follow you, but it adds another layer of 'service' to fail.
