About Best Cellular

Best Cellular is a free reference for people who want to leave their wireless carrier and keep their phone number. We publish the account number, transfer PIN and port-out steps for 230 US carriers and MVNOs, and we say which of the three remaining networks each one actually runs on.

No account. No sales call. No form standing between you and the number you came here for.

Best Cellular is not a phone company anymore

This matters enough to say near the top, because the name confuses people. Best Cellular operated as a multi-carrier MVNO — a prepaid wireless service with retail stores. That business no longer operates.

There are no Best Cellular plans, no SIM cards, no activations, no stores and no support line. If you are an old customer looking for service, we cannot help you with that. If you are trying to find your carrier’s account number or transfer PIN, that is exactly what this site does now — start here.

What we publish

The wireless industry consolidated down to three networks: AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Everything else you can buy is a brand renting space on one of them. Which network your carrier uses decides your coverage. The logo on the bill does not.

Almost nobody leads with that, so we do. Every carrier page answers four questions in the first screen:

  • Where your account number is, and what format it takes
  • How to get your transfer PIN, including the ones carriers hide behind a phone call
  • Which network the carrier actually runs on
  • The exact port-out steps, in the order that does not lose your number

Alongside that: a plain-English guide to switching carriers, a page on what to do when a port gets rejected, and current carrier unlock policies, which change more often than any other fact on this site.

How the information gets verified

Primary sources only

Every carrier page is checked against the carrier’s own documentation — published support pages, account terms and porting policies. We do not copy other comparison sites, which is how a wrong account-number format spreads across twenty domains and stays wrong for years.

Dated, and corrected in public

Carriers change their port-out process without announcing it. Pages carry the date the facts were last checked. When something is out of date, tell us and it gets fixed — corrections are not buried.

No paid placement, ever

No carrier can buy a position, a rating, a recommendation or a review on this site. No carrier sees a page before it publishes. If a carrier’s port-out process is bad, the page says so.

How this site makes money

Some links to carriers on this site are affiliate links. If you sign up for service after clicking one, Best Cellular may earn a commission. It costs you nothing extra, and it is how the research gets paid for.

Three limits on that, and they are not negotiable:

  • Commissions never change the data. Account numbers, PINs, port-out steps and network assignments are facts. They are not for sale.
  • Commissions never change the order. Where we recommend carriers, they are filtered by the network you actually need and then sorted by price — not by what pays us.
  • We tell you which carrier pays us, on the page where it pays us. Not once in a footer nobody reads.

This follows the Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides, 16 CFR Part 255. The full statement is on the affiliate disclosure page.

Who runs Best Cellular

Best Cellular and bestcellular.com are owned and operated by Assertive Holdings, LLC.

M. Curtis McCoy is the editor. He originally launched Best Cellular as a multi-carrier MVNO, which is the reason this site knows where the account numbers are hidden — he spent years on the other side of the porting process, taking customers off these carriers.

Operated by Assertive Holdings, LLC
Editor M. Curtis McCoy
Domain registered August 28, 1998
Held by the company since 2010
Carriers tracked 230 US carriers and MVNOs
Contact Contact Best Cellular

What we will not do

  • We will not ask for your account number, your transfer PIN, your Social Security number or your carrier password. Nobody at Best Cellular needs them. Anyone claiming to be us and asking for them is not us.
  • We will not sell your information. See the privacy policy.
  • We will not publish a carrier recommendation on a page where we cannot confirm which network that carrier runs on.

Best Cellular™ is a trade name of Assertive Holdings, LLC. Carrier names, logos and trademarks on this site belong to their respective owners and are used for identification only. Best Cellular is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon or any carrier listed on this site.