I’m an American living abroad and I use a VoIP service to maintain my US number. It had actually gotten more difficult to do this because of the changes they are making.
A few weeks ago I needed to submit docs proving I was a legitimate business with US tax id and whatnot… If you don’t have that, you have to provide an alternate number from a traditional phone contract of someone who lives in the US. Unless I were to pay for a phone subscription in America, there is no option for an individual to do this independently. I needed to use a family member’s number.
My American phone number is very much necessary but I only use it on very rare occasions… Paying something like $30-40 per month for an American phone contract (that I’ll never use) plus the $15-20 per month fee for the voip provider is excessive.
If they just had an id verification system for American citizens and didn’t tie it to a domestic account holder, that would be something.