This is something I did years ago, but I wondered if the old number worked. I figured I’d document it for posterity and before senility sets in. So I asked my daughter to call me using the old number and it did ring my cell phone. The only thing unusual was a voice telling me to press 1 to accept the call.
For sentimental reasons I didn’t want to loose my old house landline phone number I had for over 30 years. That number was one of the first things I had my kids memorize when they were little. Not really being a heavy phone user, I waited a long time before getting a cell phone. So when I finally got a cell phone I for a while, had both the old and the new phone(s) and numbers.
Back then, I finally just cancelled my house phone and let the number go into that great abandoned phone number graveyard in the sky. Then I heard about Google Voice. I found out you could route another phone number to your cell phone with Google voice. But it only works by transferring a cell phone…not a landline phone number to Google voice. So before using Google voice I would first have to transfer my old landline phone number to a mobile phone. However many months had passed after cancelling my old phone number, but I called AT&T and to my surprise they hadn’t given that number out. So I miraculously I was able to get it back. It might have helped that I bought a cheap AT&T Go phone to transfer my old AT&T phone number to first. All this was still in the AT&T family.
I was then able for $20 to transfer the cheap cell phone number (old house number) to Google voice. Then Google actually forwards calls from the old number to my cell phone or any other phone number I’d like. So for example if I was going to spend a few weeks in a remote cabin with no cell phone access but they did have a landline, I could change my forwarding destination to the cabin landline number.
If I remember correctly…you have a lot more control if you use the Google Voice app on your cell phone. You can actually tell your phone to call out on the old number. It will save voice mails or transcribe voice calls to text.
Google Voice will actually assign you another number for free if you just want another number for your cell phone.