Thanks everyone! Great advice. I received several off-list replies from people and domains that I know and trust. Nothing's fast in number porting, but I think I'm in pretty good hands working towards a solution. -A On Thu, Jul 9, 2026 at 10:15 AM Aaron C. de Bruyn <aaron@heyaaron.com> wrote:
Hey everyone,
I've run into a situation I've never dealt with before, and it's personal...
My dear old mother has had a phone number in the 509-427 prefix for about 50 years now.
It's survived all the US West, Qwest, Embarq, Century Link, Lumen, whatever changes over the decades...and finalle ended up taking a deal from her ISP (a CLEC) to bundle her phone/internet .
This all worked out pretty well until a few year or so when the ISP was sold to new management and service tanked. They've had several multi-day and even a multi-week outage.
Fast forward to a month ago, and my mom decided to sign up for Starlink and cancel her old DSL bundle. Being 80 years old, she had no idea her "home phone" was linked to her DSL service....and as luck would have it, the day after she cancelled she ended up having a minor stroke.
When I realized her home phone was disconnected, I asked her to call her former ISP and see if they could recover and just port out the number...my intent being to attach it to my existing infrastructure and simply forward calls to her cell phone.
Her ISP said "we released the number 2 weeks ago, there's no way to get it back".
I know I've seen numbers get recovered before...but since I'm not a CLEC or anything other than just a guy who helps support a handful of VoIP installs, it's beyond me if it's possible or how I could get the number back.
I also seem to recall ~8 years ago that the local switch didn't support number portability and it doesn't show up as having any numbers available if I try to acquire a number out of the "STEVENSON WA" area.
Am I out of luck?
Thanks,
-A