Keeping My Taiwanese Number when returning to the U.S. - Any Cost-Effective Suggestions?

Taiwan Living in Taiwan
1

Hey all,

As a dual citizen of both Taiwan and the United States, I’ve been residing in Taiwan for the past two years serving my mandatory military conscription, and in that time I’ve come to depend on my local Taiwanese number. However, I’m about to return to the United States for the foreseeable future, and I’m searching for a cost-effective method to retain this number.

The number serves primarily as my contact for friends, and it’s also tied to various accounts I have here. I don’t foresee needing to use it for calls or texts while I’m in the U.S., but it’s important that I could keep this number if I return in the future.

I came across two popular suggestions on Dcard:

  1. Purchase a prepaid card and charge it with $100 TWD every six months.
  2. Opt for a monthly plan, with the lowest ranging around $130 TWD.

Unfortunately, options such as Skype and CallHippo, which I know work for European numbers and business numbers respectively, don’t seem to support personal Taiwanese numbers.

If anyone has personal experience with this, or any other recommendations beyond the two options I mentioned above, I would be really grateful. Even more so if you’ve managed to find a solution that is both cost-effective and relatively hassle-free.

Thanks in advance!

Alex

1 Like
2

I had the CHT Prepaid (Ideal) Card for that purpose. The downside is that it does not support roaming, so you won’t be able to get text messages when you are outside of Taiwan. Also, you have to remember to recharge every 6 months (I believe the app supports automatic recharging now), otherwise the number can get assigned to someone else. Another issue is that foreign credit cards might not work for recharging.

3

What about getting a Google Voice number? I did to keep my US number but I don’t know how that would work for a Taiwan number.

4

Low cost phone contract is all I can think of. You can migrate the number from your prepaid card.

Or you can top up every 6 months, the trouble is topping up from outside Taiwan may be a little tricky.

5

CHT’s lowest is NT$199 per month with roaming.
You’ll be able to get text messages in the U.S. at no cost. Gives 1GB download in Taiwan per month. If you add NT$100 (for total NT$299 per month), you get a total of 6Gb download per month and free Hami Video for a year. which gives you live news, sports, and entertainment channels from Taiwan.

6

I’m a Taiwanese citizen, so I do own a debit card here, but I believe that a Apple Card (Mastercard) could be charged in foreign currencies with no fees too.

7

Is there online portals that allows direct top up? Because most the time you topped up by calling a special number and entering a code. But that number won’t work from outside Taiwan.

8

Most let you top up from the app

9

Then you will be fine. I used my Post Office debit card to top up from the app or the web site when I was in the US. Credit cards issued by banks in the US used to work until maybe 3 or 4 years ago…

10

Hey all, I found a solution, though it may be too cumbersome for some.

I ended up purchasing a modem/router and flashing it with ROOter, I then settled on using cloudflare, putting the access behind cloudflare tunnel and zero trust with mock SAML, and exposing it on my personal domain.

At this time, I can simply plug the SIM in and log into my website (the router) to check/send text messages, but when I leave Taiwan, the router and SIM is here to stay.