Bandwidth Porting Overview

Telephone number porting is the process by which a telephone number is moved from one service provider to another. Bandwidth provides a number of tools and services to make porting telephone numbers as easy as possible.

This section summarizes the Bandwidth tools available for porting automation and provides links that can be used to drill down for more detailed information.

At a high level, Bandwidth provides porting tools in two broad categories: Port-in and Port-out.

Bandwidth asynchronous APIs like porting use a common pattern that we refer to as “orders”. With orders, you can either poll to check the progress, or you can subscribe for **notifications **as the order progresses.

Port-in

From the Bandwidth perspective, port-in means moving a telephone number from another service provider to Bandwidth, or to one of Bandwidth's off-net partners. It could also mean porting a number from one of Bandwidth’s service provider customers to another of Bandwidth’s service provider customers.

For more detailed information about porting numbers in, please see Port-ins Overview.

Port-out

Porting out is moving telephone numbers from Bandwidth to another service provider, or to another of Bandwidth’s service provider customers. Port-outs are of interest to the service provider that is porting the number in, or away from Bandwidth, and to Bandwidth customers who want to know which numbers are porting out of their account.

For detailed information about port-out requests (called LSRs) and port-out notifications, please refer to Port-outs Overview.

Orders

For APIs that can take longer than around 30 seconds, Bandwidth creates an order to track the progress of the API. There are many types of orders, but they all work in basically the same way. The POST operation creates the order and returns a unique order-id by which you can refer to the order. Using the order-id, you can GET, PUT, PATCH (in some cases), or DELETE the order.

For more information about Orders, please refer to Order Model.

Notifications

Since orders are asynchronous and can take time to progress through the various states to completion, you have two options for tracking progress. You can either use the GET operation with the order-id to poll for the current state of the order, or you can subscribe to notifications about order state changes, or notes. You may subscribe to email notifications, or webhook notifications.

For detailed information about how to subscribe for order notifications, please see Subscribe/Notify.

Porting Terminology

For a table of porting terms, please refer to Porting Terminology.