Many friends and family have asked about how to get in touch with us while we’re away, and it turns out that technology provides all of you with a variety of options! I’ll start with the most straightforward pieces of it all, and then I’ll get into the technical pieces of it for those that are interested.
The short answer is that you don’t have to do anything different than how you have always contacted us in the US. Call, text, or email as you always have.
Just keep in mind that we’re at least 5 hours ahead of you, and that we love you, but we don’t want to text at 1 am GMT even though you’re just wrapping up dinner.
You can also use WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, Google Voice, Facebook Messenger, FaceTime, and iMessages to text, call, or do video calls. Or you can pony up the international charges to call us directly on our UK numbers. Brad and I both have all of these apps (minus the Apple platforms for Brad), so take your pick!
Anyhow, back to what you may be asking yourself, which is “How is it possible we can still call Summer’s US cell number?” The answer is that we ported our numbers into Google Voice. For those of you who are considering a move abroad, or are just curious, I’ll briefly explain how it works.
Porting your phone number is pretty commonplace. It’s how you’re able to move phone numbers across service providers, like if you change from Verizon to Sprint, and is controlled by the FCC. In this instance, Google has created a service in which you can port your US cell phone number into their app, Google Voice. The only caveat is that you must do this while you’re in the United States, because there are certain pieces of the process that are dependent on you having a US IP address on your computer and also accepting phone calls from a US-based location. You also need to be okay with going dark from a cell phone perspective for a couple of hours/ days while the porting is being executed.
What this then does, is that when you go abroad, as long as you have WiFi and/or cellular data, if someone calls the US number, it’s routed through the app and you receive calls, texts, and voicemail no matter where you are in the world. Nothing different happens from the US end user perspective.
The only tricky bit becomes on our end, to make outgoing calls, Google Voice does charge a fee. That’s why for the folks we like to call regularly, we’ve asked that you have a WhatsApp/ Google Hangouts account or use a iPhone and be ready to FaceTime. From our perspective, WhatsApp is the easiest of all of the messaging/calling features to utilize, as it provides a reliable service in which we can call and message back to the States. This is what we suggest people use if possible, just so then there are no worries about international charges on either end of things.
No matter the service, the most amazing thing to me is that there are so many options to stay in touch! We’re so lucky that it’s such a big world, but made so small through technology.
Carolina to Crumpets 