Pay as you go services

[Chris_]

A little while back, I got a PAYG sim card and was planning to move to Vodafone eventually once I was out of my O2 contract, but I wanted to test to see how good the coverage was on Vodafone in the places I'd visit and so took an additional phone with me and compared that with the O2 one. O2's coverage was not always good and I found Vodafone's better.

The number I was issued with the SIM was quite easy to remember and so the plan was to that that one and use that as my main number when I moved to Vodafone.

Unfortunately I was not aware that Vodafone cut off sim cards after x amount of time of no calls, and only found out about it when I swapped my sim card into another phone, and found it was coming up as an inactive sim.

I've reordered another payg sim and put it in the same phone, but it comes with a different and rather unmemorable number. I've tried ringing my old number but it's not recognised.

Is there a way I can recover the old number and place it onto this sim before anyone else nabs it?

I know when I rung Orange up with a similar problem a while back (I bought a phone locked to orange, unlocked it and forgot about the sim and tenner worth of credit on it until recently) they were more than happy to reactivate the old sim with the number it came with, they just had to send me out a new card.

[AnnS · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, if it has been more than 270 days since the SIM was last used to make a chargeable call you will be unable to get the number back.

If it has been less, you could try topping up the number and making a chargeable call, if it accepts the top up, you may be able to get the number back, but as the SIM already shows as inactive, the number could already be 'quarantined' ready to be reissued and it will not be possible to retrieve the number.

This is explained in the Vodafone PAYG Terms and Conditions