How do I keep my number when switching to the same provider (Three to Three)
If you're switching supplier, keeping your phone number is now very easy. You can now text for your Porting Authorisation Code (PAC) and give this to your new supplier. If you're staying on the same network, the PAC process doesn't work, and it's essentially down to your supplier.
As far as we're aware you essentially have two options. Your options are as follows:
- If you want to buy a new contract, e.g. 1GB of data for £5/month through Billmonitor, Three will not allow you to simply transfer your number over. Instead, they will ask you to make your old number a Pay As You Go (PAYG) number first. When you ask them to do this, they will tell you that this process takes 1 month. You could then wait for (just under) a month, and purchase the new contract just before this happens. They can then transfer your (now PAYG) number to your new contract. Obviously this delays things by a month, and is a fair amount of hassle.
- If you call up Three and tell them you've found this deal online with Billmonitor and you'd like to switch your current contract to it, they'll tell you they are unable to match third party deals. However, they are likely to offer it to you for a little bit more each month. Be careful about them offering more data than you need (e.g. we can give you 12GB for £10/month), and get them to give you a good offer for the amount of data you actually want. We would hope you could get e.g. 1GB of data for £6/month, for example.
Option 1 is more hassle, takes a month, but will put you on a slightly cheaper contract in the long run. Option 2 is obviously much easier, and can still be a good option depending on what they offer you.
We know that some users have managed to get option 1 by complaining a lot, but they are always told that it is a "one-off", so we expect it will be quite hard to get Three to do this. Unfortunately, we do believe they make it difficult purely because they know you'd rather pay an extra couple of pounds a month than go through the hassle.
We're always campaigning to make switching easier, and if you're changing provider the new "text-to-switch" has really improved things. Unfortunately, we do strongly feel that there is much further to go when sticking with your current provider.
We hope that helps. Please do not hesitate to contact us if anything is unclear, or if you have further questions.