Techcrunch have a very interesting article up regarding Google and number portability. At Denphone we have been watching with a lot of interest Google's move into the telephony market. The techcrunch article explains that with Google Voice, it is possible within the United States to port your current number to the Google Voice service. This means that people don't need to go through the hassle of changing all of their business cards, office stationary and so on.

We would love for that to be possible here in Japan. However, number portability is not normally possible in Japan where that number is in a different geographical area.

Google Voice’s Secret Weapon: Number Portability

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Once you’ve jumped in head first to the product it will straighten out your phone life forever. You’ll never have to worry about figuring out which phone numbers to give to different people. Give them one number - your Google Voice number - and then use rules to determine where your calls go based on who’s calling and what you are doing.

There are significant switching costs, though. You have to tell everyone your new phone number and get them to start using that, instead. New business cards have to be printed, which is another cost. For most people, that’s just too much heavy lifting to fully embrace the service. And there’s the additional problem of your outbound calls and outbound text messages showing the phone number of the device you are calling from instead of your Google Voice number. Your friends need to store that number or they won’t know who’s calling. And once it’s stored, they’ll use it, bypassing all the great voicemail and call routing features of Google Voice.

But Google has a plan to deal with all of these issues, we’ve heard. And it starts with Number Portability.

Today you are issued a new phone number when you sign up for Google Voice. But we’ve confirmed that a very small number of people have ported their existing numbers to Google (Google uses Level3 to handle phone numbers). In the U.S. it’s possible to port any phone number to another service provider - even a mobile number to a voip provider like Level3.

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We would love number portability to be possible in Japan. However unless the law changes, that is not going to be a possibility. You can read the complete tech crunch article here: Google Voice’s Secret Weapon: Number Portability