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Cell Phones Companies Fight Number Portability
andy1307 writes "The Washington Post is reporting that wireless companies are opposing mobile number portability. According to the law as it is being written, customers would be able to transfer wired phone numbers to a wireless service. Not surprisingly, Verizon is the wireless company opposing the law."
I had the same problem with emails.. Change ISP, and you have to change email accounts. Similar problem ,as your correspondance and cards all have to change. You also have to alert everybody that olduser@oldisp.com is now gone. Pretty much a pain in the ass.
/.ing ). My IP's can change ill it wants, I can simply use an auto-update daemon.
Well now, I purchased my own domain name and I run my own mail server. If somebody wants to email me, they aim it at user@mydomainname.com (my domain hidden to protect from
What I'm saying, is have the similar sort of dial-setup. You can either buy a phone redirection circuit, or if there's dealers out there, buy a redirection phone number.
Old style=
Caller => You
New style=
Caller => Redirection service => wherever you specify
My plan's sort of like DNS for phones.
Considering reading the article before commenting? Don't bother. They haven't done their homework. The reason they're fighting the number portability laws? Because it would increase their costs... I'll let the cognitive dissonance batter your brain a little bit on that one.
Lame, lame, lame mobile phone providers. Get a clue. Service your customers. Provide value for the money. How about more anytime minutes per month? Or how about if you don't use your anytime minutes this month, they roll over to next month?
Come on, people. Stop sitting comfortably on your piles of ill-gotten profits and serve the customers like you're supposed to be doing. I swear, the way our legislature is bending over and taking it from the corps in this country is astounding.
fifth sigma, inc.
...is that phone companies, pager companies, etc., buy numbers in blocks of 10,000 and have rights to them forever, so whether they're used or not they don't return to the pool. Because they hold your number they can hold you hostage. God forbid they should compete on service.
If we didn't have this situation, there would be no need for the constant splitting of area codes.
Er, yes your honour each customer who intends to keep his number due to crapp^H^H^H^H^H reasons, which we really don't understand will cost us 2$37.
Lawyers for the CTIA and Verizon Wireless claim the rule is unnecessary because competition for the nation's 144 million wireless subscribers remains robust.
Yes guvernor, we spent 230'000'000$ annually for lawyers and lobbying in order to fuck^H^H^H^H provide for better customer service...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Just think - the ability to keep numbers allows anyone to switch to the cheapest price plan du jour, until the price war bottoms out. Then what? Maybe certain companies (anyone? anyone? ) would have to stop competing on pure price and actually start to offer services valuable to customers, such as the ability to make and receive calls reliably.. the horror! (in fact, the telcos could even realize that if thousands of people in a certain area code are ditching, then perhaps it's time to buy a few more towers there?)
never underestimate the powers of condescension - It knows not the bounds of time or space
IIRC this feature of financially "binding" customers to their existing networks (or encouraging e.g. families to use the same operator) is under investigation as a possibly illegal marketing strategy. 5 minutes of googling didn't help in finding a reference, but I recall reading about it in the paper here. So it could be merely a temporary anomaly in mobile pricing.
Let's just play devil's advocate for a minute. In the UK it used to be the case that you could tell the mobile operator from the dialing code of the number, e.g. 07866 for Orange, 07788 for Vodafone. (This can still be done at UK Phone Information.) This was useful, since many tariffs give you free or cheaper calls to numbers belonging to the same operator. Since numbers became portable, you can no longer make an assumption as to the operator.
While it certainly an advantage for the consumer for his/her number to be portable, it may end up costing him/her more.
Number portability is a very good idea. Unfortunately, there's some real costs and problems involved in implementing it.
For instance, operators get large series of numbers. This can be blocks of tens of thousands to tens of millions of numbers, with a specific prefix. Just like Internet routing, those blocks (or prefixes, if you want to think that way) decide where a call goes.
Now, what happens when you want to make a number portable? Well, those blocks still exist. The problem is that whenever you make a phonecall, the connection goes to the operator who owns the block. That operator, in turn, looks up the number and decides what to do with it. If it's a number that's moved to another operator, they either redirect the connection, or establishes additional connections to the new operator (depending on the technology used). The costs of doing so is sometimes greater than just accepting a call to one of their own customers.
Now, add the cost of updating the exchanges, the billing systems, educating the staff and so on and you'll quickly realise that this is not a trivial task. Also remember that this adds a huge amount of complexity to the telephone system, a system that's already overly complex.
Compare this, for instance, with trying to implement portable IP-numbers. It's not the same thing (different technology among other things), but the complexity issues are similar.
"Not surprisingly, Verizon is the wireless company opposing the law."
I would cancel my Verzion phone as soon as this becomes law.
My number is so important to me that I am paying them 25/mo just to forward my number to my Nextel.
I don't use verizon service at all. This really does suck.
I think many others would love to avoid this service fee and keep their good number and choose providers that work best in their area.
The wireless market has becoming so saturated and too competitive, this won't help them in any way.
It would help us wireless users tho. I'm all for it.
Umm...My parents/relatives can call me from there landlines with no LD (long Distance Charges ) now. That means alot to me so i like different area codes for different markets instead of one or two area codes for the cell phones of a company. Those new area codes would undoubtably be long distance from everywere.
Maybe Slashdot should adopt a category for US centric news?
FAQ
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
The fact that telephones have numbers at all in the digital age seems silly. Well established psychological research has shown a very long time ago that people's short term memory isn't good at dealing with big numbers. The whole concept of using phone numbers to call people goes against usability principles, yet there doesn't seem to be a serious effort to get rid of them in most places. It's not just legacy technology, it's legacy industrial age thinking.
Firstly, telephones shouldn't normally be the addressee. People should be the addressee. Secondly, people shouldn't have to have numbers, they should have names.
Many phones already try to emulate names by providing calling directories, and it's a real hack. I don't know the numbers for many of my friends because I rely on my phone to hide it, and I only interact with the names to call people. I hate to think what'd happen if I lost my phone, though. Also when someones phone number/address changes, it really messes things up for everyone who knows them.
So how long is it going to be before digital phones and digital networks actually do away with numbers altogether, in a way where other people can change their phone's address without everyone else having to know or care? Obviously there would be numbers in the system somewhere, but they shouldn't be needed in a user interface any more than the primary key of a typical database table is needed.
It might be a temporary anomaly in mobile pricing, but it is a permeant feature of the underlying mobile cost. If you are an orange customer calling another orange customer the call can (and most likely does) run entirely over a network that orange has payed for, and doesn't cost orange anything. If you are an orange customer and call an O2 customer then you have to pay O2 to put the call through, and you may have to pay someone other then O2 to bring the voice traffic to O2.
So if the "anomaly in mobile pricing" goes away, it will vanish because same network call prices will go up.
One USA moble provider has yet another issue. Their cell phones can actually make direct handset to handset "intercom" calls. I think they make those calls directly like walkie-talkies (there is a distance limit). They charge $0.00 per minute for this.
The phone companies need to stop the turn over on cell phone number, and have about a 6 month period where the number is not active. Then they need to include that nice little greeting that will tell you what the number has been changed too, even if its with a different carrier. I know every time I have switched my land line when I have moved they have always given me the option to put whatever number I want on that little message people get. I do like the idea of number portability, but there definetly needs to be a system of penalities for switching too often. The reason is, I know some people would switch carriers every month or 2, and I do think that is a bit unfair to the market.
We should add a new DNS record type for international telephone numbers. It'd be reasonably easy to have a DNS gateway over cellphone networks so that phones can resolve the phone number from a name before dialling.
Sure, it would be harder to enter the number the first time on a numeric keypad, but you'd store the name in your phone's memory so that you only have to type it once, and those with phones with QWERTY keyboards would be set!
It sure would be nice to be able to dial sales.somecompany.com rather than having to look up their number first. The main benefit, though, is the abstraction -- people can change their numbers and only be out of touch for the time it takes for the DNS record to expire.
The benefit of using a separate record type is that, like with MX records, it could coexist with other record types so that, for example, support.ibm.com could resolve to both an IP address and a telephone number.
I'm sure some company would soon step in with cheap 'catchy' phone hostnames in similar vein to free, throwaway email for those who don't have the know-how, desire or funds to run their own domain.
Why DNS? Because it's already there, and it works well.
I dont get this claim. Just because the US doesn't have "1" standard, doesn't mean the technoogy isn't good. What makes GSM better than CDMA? The fact is, that in europe, most countries are the size of a US state, therefore it is much easier for the provider to get complete coverage. I dont think it has to do with the technology.. The US is a big country, it takes a lot more capital to create the kind of network where you get coverage everywhere, be it CDMA or GSM.