I'm not 100% caught up on the thread but I thought I'd post this piece of info.

If you're going to port a number, think about porting it to google voice. That way you shouldn't have to worry about it in the future, unless Google goes out of business and then who knows.

We did that with our old home line (had with Qwest for 15 years) and now it rings our new home line, both our cells and at times my moms cell (takes a minute or two to change). When trying out VoIP providers (before Ooma) our house number changed 4 times in 5 months and if we hadn't had the google voice line it would have been a gigantic PITA.