About a year and a half ago, I got a Verizon Wireless phone and decided to go ahead and activate it with a new number (even though the old was also Verizon), because I hadn't lived in the old area code for about 4 years; I called everyone I could think of on my old phone's contact list to tell them the new number, but I still wanted to be able to use that old number later, so I never got rid of the phone.

Now I see that it has the capability to use NAM1 and NAM2; I wonder whether it's possible to activate the phone with the old number as NAM2, so I can use it if I'm ever in the old area again and don't want to look like such an out-of-towner.

I heard that Verizon prefers to keep one number per ESN, however, and I can't just swap SIM cards because these phones don't have them; one possibility is to actually transfer my old number to some entity like Amp'd that uses Verizon's network but not its database...of course, I'd have the problem of two separate billing plans (both old and new numbers were on prepaid phones BTW), but it would still seem like a slight convenience.
I would also need to figure out how to activate a Verizon-branded phone with Amp'd or whatever other provider it is.

5/19/2012 11:53:01 PM

Can you make your old number a google voice number and just use it that way for free?

5/20/2012 9:37:15 AM

Maybe if I had acted soon enough...I went ahead and switched to NAM2 and tried to activate, only to learn that this is only used if the programming on NAM1 gets screwed up somehow; then I tried to go through the process of deactivating the old number only to find that it had been cancelled and reassigned already.

5/20/2012 2:09:05 PM