I recently switched away from TMobile to Ting, which is great ($15 bill the first month, woohoo). However, service on both Tmo and Sprint are not great at my new house, *and* I can probably save even more money by using voip stuff, so I've been playing around with that.
The number porting stuff confuses me. Right now I have my old ancient number on my Ting cell phone, and the various free voip apps/services all have different (random) temporary numbers while I try them out. When and if I decide to switch to using a free voip service, how does the number porting work? Does my Ting (cell) phone get a random number, while ring.to gets my ancient number? If someone calls my ancient number and I'm not on wifi, does it automatically forward to my random Ting number?
I've currently tried Mo+ (which hassled me about credits after like 10 mins and stopped working), talkatone (which also apparently only allows 10 free mins/month, and likes to disconnect). Next up, I plan to try GrooveIP/ring.to, which looks more promising. Anyone have suggestions for what I should be trying? Most info I search for online in this regard is out of date, as Google Voice changed their API back in May to not allow third party apps to use it. I have no interest in using Google Hangouts, as I like to keep my life separate from the Googleverse.