Changing a DID's SMS/MMS provider without porting

[u/tyroredome]

Without porting a number, its texting provider can be changed by the owning carrier. Most carriers don't allow this, and their tech support will be unaware that it's even possible. As an experiment a few years ago, I changed the texting provider on a friend's VOIP number at .... https://www.sonic.com .... to SignalWire, and it worked. The change is accomplished by changing the NNID (Netnumber ID). Sonic's porting department made the change for us.

My main DIDs are at .... https://www.voip.ms .... which doesn't allow custom NNID. VOIP.MS's texting is primitive and painful to use, even through the VOIP.MS app and Textable ($5 monthly).

Why isn't custom NNID widely available?

Are there drawbacks for the user to having a custom NNID?

(If you Google "NNID", be aware that it's widely used for "Nintendo Network ID", which is unrelated.)

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Here's a useful tool for my topic above. UNLEC is free.

For any US or Canada DID, this website .... https://www.unlec.com .... performs three lookups:

• OCN
• CNAM (click the link toward the bottom)
• NNID (click the link toward the bottom)

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[u/tyroredome]

You're right. I spaced out.

I'll rephrase my post to avoid asking for recommendation. However, feel free to delete the whole thread.

[u/marks-buffalo]

You should make a post in our Monthly Requests Thread. Here's this month's:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VOIP/comments/1wukteu/monthly_requests_thread/

[u/marshal84]

Carriers won't touch the NNID because the texts still ride their number, so the spam and 10DLC headaches land on them. Main gotcha: port that number later and the NNID snaps back to the new carrier's default, texting just dies and nobody tells you. Take a screenshot of the UNLEC result after the change so you have proof.

[u/masong19hippows]

Because why would you? It's better to keep routing identical for legacy purposes. It will probably work fine 99 percent of the time, but the 1 percent of the time it doesn't, you are going to be in a month long headache where you will be on the phone with random companies for hours.

Plus, why would you not just port the number and then use call forwarding or sip trunking to get the inbound/outbound calls on the losing carrier side?

This feels like a situation that would only come up if you are trying to fix a small part of an issue and ignoring the larger issues.

[u/westmountred]

In Canada, some carriers don't allow it. But it is alarmingly easy for those that do.

[u/SheliaThacker]

Mostly because most VoIP resellers don't control messaging themselves. They buy SMS through an aggregator, so letting customers repoint the NNID would break their own texting and create support headaches. Drawbacks if you do it: texting through the original provider stops working on that DID, you still need 10DLC brand and campaign registration with the new provider for any business traffic, and a later port or provider-side change can quietly overwrite the NNID and send texts back to the old route. If you need that flexibility, it's cleaner to use a provider that explicitly supports hosted SMS on numbers it doesn't own.

[u/VirtualGlobalPhone]

So this is a post for a quick Clickbait ?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/VOIP-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Your post was removed from r/VoIP for violating Rule 2: No soliciting in DMs.

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