What’s the best way to keep a US number on my EU mobile?

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Accepted answer

You could use Google Voice for this. It allows you to get a US number in an area code of your choosing (some existing numbers can also be transferred to Google Voice, but not all). The Google Voice number itself is free, and there is no ongoing fee, you just pay for outgoing calls to certain numbers (US calls are free). I believe there is a small fee for transferring a number into Google Voice.

Once you have a GV number, you can choose to make VOIP calls with it, or have calls to the GV number forwarded to various other phones. You can also send text messages from GV, and make outgoing calls for reasonable rates. It does require a data connection to work, and there are some limitations (not sure if I'm thinking of all of them, but I think these are the major ones):

  • For some countries, you can only receive texts from their numbers, not send to them (for example, Germany)
  • Some text services do not go through to GV, for example, some of those one time codes that get sent to you when you try to log in to your bank's website
  • You're at Google's whim for the existence of this service. Google has been known to decide to discontinue some services that are actually quite popular

Upvote:-2

if I was you why not just transfer your USA number to the EU SIM card?

Maybe I’m missing something and not understanding your question correctly in which case let me know, but some phones even allow two sims, if I was you and I was living in Europe but wanted to keep my US number I would transfer, one phone one Sim? With Skype and WhatsApp etc you just need data not minutes.

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