Moving a phone number is mostly forms. Then one morning, it's just done.

Can’t I just forward it?

The first question in September was the lazy one: could I leave the number in Google Voice and just forward everything to Telnyx? No. Telnyx won’t attach its texting service to a Google Voice number. To own the texting, I had to own the number. That meant porting.

The 10DLC boss fight, round two

This round, Orion (ChatGPT’s Codex) drove the paperwork with me. On September 8, in one long evening:

1. ID check. Telnyx verified my identity with a photo ID and selfie, which unblocked the account.
2. Business details. We caught that a draft of my business info didn’t match my actual IRS letter, threw it out, and used the real paperwork instead. Mismatched tax details are one of the most common reasons a 10DLC brand gets rejected.
3. Brand submitted at 4:51 PM. Verified at 8:47 PM.
4. Website pages. The carriers want to see SMS terms and a privacy policy on your site, including how STOP, START and HELP work. Those went up on my business site the same night.
5. Campaign submitted at 9:02 PM as “Customer Care,” which is exactly what my texting is: talking to people who already know me.

The fees, so you know what you’re in for: $4.50 for the brand, $15 for each campaign review, and $10 a month for the Customer Care campaign. The campaign sat in “pending” with the carriers for two days, then went active on September 10.

The letter

Porting a number runs on a Letter of Authorization (LOA). It’s a signed statement that you own the number and want it moved, plus proof, usually a screenshot or bill showing the number on your account. Google Voice also has you unlock the number for transfer first.

By September 11 the port order was filled out and waiting on one thing: my signature. We asked for the earliest activation slot: Tuesday, September 15, at 10 AM Mountain.

Port day

There’s no fanfare when a number ports. Nobody calls you. At some point in the morning, the old carrier lets go and the new one picks it up.

Here’s the message I sent my AI teammate at 10:42 that morning:

Ten years in Google Voice, gone from the app in one quiet refresh. Texts to my number were now landing on Telnyx and getting passed to my server. The first test texts went in and out. It worked.

The 2FA scare

One thing did rattle me that afternoon. A service I use refused to send a login code to my number, with an error saying it doesn’t send codes to VoIP numbers.

That’s a real thing to plan for. Some banks and apps won’t text verification codes to internet-based numbers. If you do this, check where your two-factor codes go before port day, and move the important ones to an authenticator app.

Six hours later

The number was mine. The texts were reaching my server. There was just one problem: I had nothing good to read them on. That afternoon I asked the question that started the second half of this story.

Rule one of moving something important: build the new house before you move out of the old one.

Don’t practice on the real number

Porting a phone number is a one-way door. Once my number left Google Voice, there was no clicking “undo” if the new setup couldn’t ring my phone. So the plan was to build everything on a new number first, live with it, and only move my real number once the new system had proven itself.

The night of June 27

Starting just before midnight on June 27, Leo (Claude, my main AI teammate) and I built a full business phone system from nothing:

• A carrier account at Telnyx. Telnyx sells phone numbers, calling and texting to businesses, and every piece of it has an API. A number costs about a dollar a month.
• A phone system on a rented cloud server. It runs FreePBX, a free, open-source office phone system built on Asterisk. That’s the software behind a lot of real business phone systems. It runs on a small cloud server that costs about $10 a month.
• A new business line, (719) 530-4040, wired through Telnyx into that phone system. Today an AI receptionist answers it.

By morning I had extensions, voicemail, call routing and a number that rang. It was the kind of thing a phone company used to charge a monthly fee per desk to set up.

That same night we also pulled my entire Google Voice history out with Google Takeout and turned it into a searchable archive with three copies. Whatever happened next, those ten years of texts were safe.

Making it trustworthy

A phone system that usually works is worse than none, because you stop checking. The next few sessions were all about the boring parts:

• Voicemail to email, so a message never sits unheard in a box I forgot about.
• Follow-me to my cell, with a “press 1 to accept” check. Without that, my cell’s own voicemail would grab the call and the phone system would think I’d answered.
• Telegram alerts for every missed call and new voicemail. Telegram is my pager. If it buzzes, something needs me.
• A fire drill. We called in, left messages and made sure every alert actually fired before calling it done.

First texts on my own server

On July 5, the first real milestone for texting: a text sent to the 4040 number landed on a little webhook service, which forwarded it to my Telegram and email. For the first time, a text to my business was data I had, not data Google had.

Receiving worked right away. Sending ran into a wall with a very boring name.

Meet 10DLC

In the US, if a business wants to send texts from a regular 10-digit phone number, the carriers want to know who you are first. The system is called 10DLC (10-digit long code). You register:

1. A brand: your business, verified against your tax records.
2. A campaign: what kind of texts you’ll send (customer care, marketing, reminders) with examples, opt-out wording, and a privacy policy on your website.

Skip it and your texts get filtered or blocked. My first try at registering the brand bounced with “Account unverified,” because the Telnyx account itself hadn’t passed an identity check yet. My account balance was sitting at $4.51 and slowly draining, and I wasn’t ready to fight that fight yet.

So I let it sit for the summer and had my AI teammates do the homework instead: what texting really costs, how 10DLC works, exactly how you get a number out of Google Voice, and what the alternatives were. Four research write-ups later, the answer was clear. The practice rig worked. The next step was the paperwork, then the real number.