Yet More on Cellular Number Portability

RadBlock writes "The Wireless Supersite has posted an interesting column analyzing number portability. Wireless carriers have been stalling on the availablity of number portability for years now. The final deadline is supposed to be in November, and it will allow you to keep your wireless phone number when you change carriers (one number for life... the ultimate!)"

Comments

Why is LNP such a big deal for cellular?

[ckuhtz]

LNP resistance in the U.S. is marketing FUD.

Other countries are already doing this for a year or two now. Take Germany. The carrier is allowed to charge you a fee (something like 25-50 euros), which often gets comp'ed by the new carrier.

This has nothing to do with technology. It's solved. It's carriers trying to keep customers hostage. Nothing more.

Re:Why is LNP such a big deal for cellular?

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, in the Netherlands there is a law for this. Every mobile telephony provider has to make it possible for its costumers to switch to another company without having to change their number. The reasoning behind this is that it would be good for fair competition in the telecommunication market.

R.

Re:Why is LNP such a big deal for cellular?

[lucifuge31337]

Ummm...that has NOTHING to do with LNP, nor does it have anything to do with Germany in particular.

You move you SIM to another phone and you have the same number, the same CARRIER, usually even the same saved phone numbers. That's how SIM-based phones work.

Re:And yet,

[ckuhtz]

LNP is an option for those who want it, not something that will get forced on you.

If you want to keep your number, cool.. LNP provides for that. If not, cool, here's your new number and your old one goes back to the pool.

Get the facts straight. Oh, wait, this > is a thread /.

Re:Does it really matter?

[binaryDigit]

If the wireless companies could cooperate, you wouldn't have to pay for this

Actually one carrot the FCC is dangling in front of the telcos is allowing them to charge you a fee for keeping your #. I personally think this is a reasonable compromise.

One number for life free is already available.

[www.sorehands.com]

This is already available from Vonage. They provide VOIP allowing you to select your area code (I picked 617 so my family can call me w/o paying long distance charges). Since the $39/month rate includes unlimited calls to USA and Canada, I forward to my cell phone when I am not home -- giving me lifetime cell number (and more) without being locked into a cell provider.

Re:One number for life free is already available.

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Sounds interesting. What do you get for referring customers, sorehands? Or should I call you "refer_id=5938p911"?

Equipment Cost

[RWarrior(fobw)]

With landline LECs (local exchange carriers), the necessary equipment and programming issues can be resolved at the switch level, where it's invisible to the customers and therefore cheaper to deal with.

I have a relative who works at a large cell phone company. At this company, they not only have to install back-end programming at the switch and call routing level, but they also have to install software in customers' handsets.

Why is that a big deal?

Older phones that customers have come to rely on, and that they understand how to operate, must be replaced. While this only affects handsets that have to have their number changed (your old handset works great until you switch numbers), it's still a hassle for both the company and the customer:

• The company must trade a new phone to the customer at no charge. Since the phones are subsidized already, this only raises the loss the company takes on each handset it sells.
• Since the handset must be replaced, the customer has to go to a local store and actually physically trade the handset back. A typical trip to a store at this company can take three hours. Customers don't like that.
• The customer must also remember to copy each item in their built-in phone book because there's no mechanism to move it from one handset to another. If they forget, their phone book is gone.
• The customer must then learn how to add numbers to the phone book and operate the new handset. Some of the handsets, like the Samsung N100, have unresolved ideosyncratic problems with them (like, sometimes when you terminate a call, the handset hard-locks such that only removing and replacing the battery will resolve it, which isn't a fun operation when you use a leather case like most folks do). The customers get confused and then call customer service for help.
• The incoming customer service calls place a larger load on their support infrastructure. The company I'm talking about is apparently looking at going back to mandatory overtime. While they pay well for it, being required to work 50 or 60 hours a week or being threatened with losing your job gets old after several weeks, because it seriously cuts into family time.
• Each incoming call to the customer service center costs an average of something like $10 to service, even if it's a 10-second call. Since the company has already replaced the handset, a money-loser, and pissed off the customer by having to do so, also a Bad Thing, increasing call volumes also cost the company money without any compensating new revenue.

While it's true that it will benefit the customer to have number portability in place, even without the lock of the number on the customer that's now gone over the number, there is no real benefit to the company. Everybody will be doing it so there's not even any competative advantage.

Cell phone companies are simply looking out for their revenue streams (as good public companies should) because number portability is nothing but a money loser for them. In a business that's still mostly in the red anyway, it's no wonder.

rw

Well I must be missing something

[Joyrex-J9]

This is just a US problem, we've had cross operator number portability in the UK for years in the UK and I think most other European countries have it too.

Re:perhaps a good idea

[laymil]

you're a very confused person when it comes to wireless tech.

of the list of wireless standars you list, at least 3 of them are made up, or bastardizations of ones already on the list.

Why do you think providers love the heavily fragment market of CDMA, TDMA, CDMA PCS, TDMA PCS, Sprint PCS, iDEN & GSM in the U.S.? Switching is hell.

Lets see. PCS stands for Personal Communications Services. CDMA PCS==CDMA TDMA PCS==TDMA Sprint PCS==CDMA. iDEN works over TDMA. So, you list 7 different cellular network types. I'm telling you there are really only 3 in the US. Unless you want to count plain old analog cellular.

Thanks for playing.

Re:Does it really matter?

[DrPascal]

Actually, according to this page:

http://cc.uoregon.edu/cnews/spring2001/whatsipv6 .h tml

It says "that implies you can assign over 3.7x10**21 addresses per square inch of the earth's surface".

Re:Phone portability is more important first

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Well, it is that simple on GSM networks.

That's why there are three of them in the US.

Cingular
T-Mobile (Yes, the same company as in Germany)
AT&T Wireless (Migrating their network to GSM)

All of these companies use SIM cards, so switching between them should be as simple as swapping SIMs and (if necessary) unlocking your phone.

Now, switching between Sprint (CDMA) and Verizon (CDMA) may be possible. I don't know if the radios in the phones are compatible, although I'd imagine that they are. Switching between Sprint and Verizon could be as simple as a over-the-air reflash.

Switching between a CDMA provider and a GSM provider would, of course, require a new phone.

Re:Delaying the inevitable?

[GlassHeart]

The cel companies should employ modern network standards along the lines of IPv6, DHCP, and ZeroConf.

IPv6 is an addressing and routing scheme to extend the number of nodes on a network. I fail to see how this applies to cell phones, each of which already has a unique routable address. No, it's not the phone number.

DHCP is used to configure a node. Some new cell phones are already configured over the air today.

ZeroConf is used to discover services. I have no idea why you think this will apply to a cellular network.

When you turn on your phone you're on the network.

What do you think happens today? Do you have to log on? Provide a password? Talk to an operator?

Who else is on the network? Your phone tells you.

A million other people are on the network.

Want to call someone? Select their name from your buddy list.

I've been doing that for years. It's a bit tedious to enter the data in the first place, but with vCards over IR or Bluetooth, it'd be quite trivial.

All this archaic ten-digit dialing, ringing, answering, messaging is all going to seem very quaint in ten years.

I don't do ten-digit dialling today, so that's not worth discussing.

Ringing? How else does a phone tell you that somebody wants to talk to you? (I'm including "vibrate" in the same category.)

Answering? This is when you start the connection. In the future it might not involve pressing a button, but certainly you will have to answer your phone somehow.

So I'm afraid I don't really know what you're talking about.

Re:Welcome to routing problems with your phone

[Phroggy]

For those of you who don't like acronyms:

His company used to get their phone service from the normal big bad evil Baby Bell phone company (ILEC). Then they switched to a smaller local carrier (CLEC) that was able to give them cheaper phone service, and stopped dealing with the ILEC (the CLEC still has to deal with the ILEC because the ILEC owns the phone lines, unless the CLEC can get permission from the city to dig up the streets and run their own lines, or whatever, but that's really expensive).

However, MCI's phone number database (LIDB) didn't have the correct information for the CLEC, so people that were using MCI as their long distance provider (IXC) couldn't call them. Calling from his company to the other people worked fine, since that doesn't rely on MCI's LIDB.

Re:The Ultimate?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how'd you get that impossible number?