Using Ooma with DSL, keeping existing phone number

[BSondergard]

Hello all,

Hopefully someone with some experience can answer this. My situation is this: I just purchased an Ooma after doing quite a bit of research online. I would like to keep my existing phone number, but have it go to the Ooma, and discontinue the landline service from the phone company. When in the Ooma activation process online and reading about number porting, I ran into this snag:

If you have high-speed Internet through a DSL service, your DSL line cannot be associated with the number you want to port.

Unfortunately, that seems like exactly what I want to do. I currently have DSL service with Earthlink (on the same phone line as the number I'd like to keep), and I'd like to stay with that and not switch over to cable internet service or anything else, BUT as I mentioned, I also want to port my existing phone number over to the Ooma and stop paying monthly phone bills.

Can anyone tell me if this is possible, or did I happen to find a particular combination of things that just won't work? I didn't read anything about this being a possible problem when I was researching the Ooma before I bought it...

Many thanks!

[Groundhound]

You'd need to convert your DSL service to "dry loop" so it's not associated with the phone line.

[murphy]

It's possible but you need what is called a dry loop DSL line. That is a DSL line that doesn't have an associated phone number.
You need to talk to your DSL provider about how to accomplish the port without losing your DSL service.

[Zindar]

I wonder if there's a way to do with without dry loop. I wonder if the DSL and associated landline could be moved to a new number, freeing up the old number to be used with ooma. But then I don't know how porting could work in that situation. I had considered looking into this possibility for myself, because I have nondry-loop DSL, but I never really investigated it, because my wife and I decided we didn't mind getting a new phone number, so we did no porting.