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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.
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.
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.