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: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.

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: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"?

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.