<p>warning:
Being able to access cc from one’s phone is not a good thing! My DH set my blackberry to get all my emails sent to it, and I get those instant notifications which tempt me to get on to read cc!!</p>
<p>If you want a local area code (which I don’t think is needed)
try google voice I don’t really know much about it but I know that its a real free phone number that can be forwarded to your computer or your phone
So the friends could call the old # and the new friends could call the new # and it would all show up on one phone.</p>
<p>
This is only true for certain phones. “Feature phones” require a $10 data plan. Simple phones do not, but they can still have texting. </p>
<p>It depends on the replacement phone.</p>
<p>For ATT, if your kiddo gets a different area code than yours, they will NOT be able to be continued on your family plan for $9.99 a line. We didn’t know that:( So…DS pays quite a bit more. If we had known that, we would have kept him on the local area code.</p>
<p>We kept our ds on our plan with the phone # from where we live, even though he currently lives in a different state. He kept his “home” (meaning our local area) # with area code all through college and the past 2 yrs he’s lived elsewhere. Never been a problem. He does also have a google phone # like notasophistamore described as well. Only issue we ever had was when he was first being added to the family plan and getting a new phone (Iphone) and we had to make changes in our dataplan. He is in another state, but was keeping the local phone # from here, and changing providers. They made him get his own plan for a few months before we could put him on our plan. It was weird and a royal pain, but its done. I dont recall all the specifics, but he and I had been on Sprint, and we were putting everyone in the family on the AT&T family plan my H had through his company. I was sorry to give up the sprint deal I had-- it was a great deal.</p>