(quote edited for brevity).
I suspect your concern is well-founded. There are others who have more experience with released number recovery than I do, but generally speaking once a number is released, it remains sequestered for some period of time to allow it to be re-claimed by the last provider of that number. How long a period seems to be a decision by the mother carrier who "owns" that number (and I believe that may be the original issuer of the number, and not the last provider).
After that period, there is a method to reclaim a number through a process called a "win back", where the individual can reclaim the number, basically by "fishing it out of the pool". I don't think this is an easy task, and there are several hoops to jump though. There is a limited time-frame for this option, as well, although I don't know what it is.
It seems to be increasingly important for CellNuvo to provide some update to the situation. It's really hard to figure out what we need to do without knowing what's being worked on at CN.
Yes, exactly... Ting helped me recover a "lost" number from RingPlus last time by "fishing it out of the pool", so I guess I'd go down that route again if CN goes away (and then port out to Tello). Here's to hoping we get an update soon...
Keep in mind that 1 way to release a phone without losing the number is what we could / can do in the self-help dashboards at R+ & Tello (& likely other providers) - swap devices. So, maybe CellNuvo swapped everyone's devices out with dummy ESNs as part of their process of remedying the lost back office contractor.
I'm still getting the "your account can't be validated. Please contact customer services" message when I make an outbound call. I hope our service is restored at least by tomorrow. It'll be five days without service (seven if you count Saturday and Sunday as well).
Is it possible the different messages are a result of where you are physically? I swear the last couple days whenever I call from my house it
just ring continuously but when I'm out I get the different messages people have listed in this thread. Just 15 minutes ago I called while out and I got the message "not validated".... back at the house it rings continuously. Not sure if it could actually be something to do with how the call is routed or the actual towers our phones are connecting to when trying to place calls. All I know is at the house I haven't heard anything other than continuous ringing since things broke last friday.
I mentioned this in one of the current CN threads: What you hear when trying to call your CN number is dependent on the provider of the phone you're calling from. I've tested from AT&T landline, Sprint, VZW MVNO, the Google Voice phones, and all get different responses.
A change in that response might tell us something, but otherwise you'd have to know the provider-supplied responses to a variety of conditions to interpret anything.
On the other hand, I believe what you hear when attempting to call out from a CN phone is a Sprint message, and should be the same for everyone if the underlying status of the CN phones is identical. The variation we're seeing seems smaller than "calling in", but isn't uniform.
@KentE yeah I had read your message from a couple days ago... but I'm talking about calling from your cellnuvo phone, not calling to it. I'm pretty consistently getting continuous ringing when I'm calling while in my house and I'm getting a message of some sort when I'm away from my house for the most part. I'm always calling the same number, my google voice number. That's why I was getting at perhaps a change in location leads to different messages. Not sure how this could be the case other than differing towers dealing with our cellnuvo phones in different manners.
I don't know about different locations but some of us have experienced changes in the message in the same location yesterday and today. Not only that but our phones have been released so you could go and activate them on another mvno if you really wanted to leave and didn't care about your number. So something did change yesterday. Maybe different locations mean different messages as well.
In the porting thread they mentioned successfully porting happening to textnow and tello. I assumed meaning a port of the number... maybe they just meant their phones were available to activate on another mvno.
I don't get it. If all these are part of a wonderful upgrade and we are seeing some movements in accounts then why won't CN announce to us thing are moving along accordingly and save us from all the guessing and stress wondering if our numbers are lost.