Moving to France presents a couple of interesting phone issues:
- What do we do about our current home phone number?
- What kind of phone do we get in France?
The goal for our home phone is to keep our existing telephone number so that the companies who we do business with will still have our existing U.S. phone number. It's not important that we pick-up when called. Rather, it's just important that the caller can call our usual number and leave a message. We can call them back from France using a lot of cheap options. I'm hopeful that we'll be using Google Voice (
http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html ) for this problem. Google voice is expected to add portability sometime later this year so we can have our existing number ported to Google voice. Very cool...and very cheap.
The phone in France is easier. Our contract with Verizon ends pretty close to the month we leave so we'll buy new phones in France and pay-as-you-go for calls. We'll try to use Skype or Google voice for any communications back to the states.
