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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.
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
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.