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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!)"
Go Calculate Something
one number for life... the ultimate!
I would say sex with twins is the ultimate, but hey, we all have priorities.
sometimes I look forward to leaving certain phone numbers behind.
Once someone knows your number, changing it's the only way get it away from them. Can't really block any single person from fucking with your phone number, they can always call from a different place.
Sounds like just another way to add a surcharge to our phone bills. Like we need another.
Wow, must be Friday, I'm bitter and sarcastic... time for beer and wings!
I just got a new cell phone number, now all the people I don't want calling me anymore can't. ;-)
Now I can get my 555-FARK phone number.
Er, wait. Wrong website.
g
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.
Poof.
one number for life... the ultimate!
... like (663) 244-7467 ... aka (ONE) BIG-PIMP
It's only the ultimate if you get a cool number
(Score:-1, Wrong)
If I could keep my number, my incentive to stay with RipOff Cellular goes down, and I'm more likely to switch to UselessMinutes Wireless Inc.
In the end, there's probably just as many people who want to switch from A to B as want to switch from B to A. But even though the numbers of subscribers might remain fairly steady, it is more expensive to lose one customer and gain another than to just keep one.
"(one number for life... the ultimate!)"
One number to find you.
One number for life.
One number for the world to call
And in the darkness (and light, and evening, and morning) bind you.
Nikkos
For the past four or five years, an increasing number of nickel-and-time charges have been appearing on my phone bill... every time I'd ask Verizon about it they would say basically "The FCC made me do it."
Well, one of those numbers was supposed to be specifically to provide phone number portability if I change carriers.
So if I'm not getting phone number portability, why am being charged for it?
I think having a number would be cool, but there are other implications. Imagine the privacy concerns of not changing your number, I understand you could get a new number if you really wanted one, but the issue still exists. Another issues is routing of the call and how much more work this would add for the phone company that they would be willing to charge you more for. In my opinion they charge to much already.
Number portability won't give the consumer much really. If you are displeased with the service of one company and decide to change carriers, you also have to acquire a new phone as well as a new number. Sure, that's not a problem when phones are free or only $0.01. But, when you start throwing in these unlimited local services that don't give away their phones, it can be costly to change carriers just because of the equipment change.
I have noticed that some people are complaining, "But if I always have the same phone number, then I can't avoid all those pesky telemarketers/ex-girlfriends/stalkers/parents/lawy ers/etc."
What these people are ignoring is that you merely have the choice to keep the same number - not an obligation. If it behooves you to keep the same number, you may do so; if not, you can drop the number just like you do now.
Giving the public more options is a "Good Thing."
This is only news in the US. For around two years (Think it's two years) people in Denmark have been able to move their number from one phone company to another, wireless or non-wireless, makes no difference. Only problem is that it's nolonger possible to tell if your calling a mobil or a regular phone.
Damn, this could allow all those revengeful ex-girlfriends and one night stands to potentially track me down!
On a serious note though. Say someone totally bails on a large bill that has accumulate with one carrier and moves to another carrier for new service. Would you have the ability to keep the same number still?
We've gone through two area code splits here in Minneapolis -- 612/651 first, and then 768/612/952 later.
Would cell number portability slow this kind of thing down? I can't help but think that each cell provider switch ties up two numbers for at least a month or so as one number gradually expires and gets put back into the re-use bin.
With this there'd be more slack in the system as providers wouldn't need as much of a supply of numbers for new customers, as some (high?) percentage could be expected to keep their numbers.
"... (one number for life... the ultimate!)"
....
Not good enough. The true ultimate number would last into the afterlife. That way, we could call dead people, and not have to remember a special post-mortem phone number.
Much superior to the old postal method of contacting dead people, via the dead-letter office
-kgj
" (one number for life... the ultimate!)"
Err I'm not sure that's the 'ultimate'. The nice thing about having everybody rotate numbers is that telemarketer records have to be updated. Then, there's the whole problem of having to have much longer phone numbers. I don't mean to poo-poo it, just that I kind of like having to rotate once in a while.
One thing I would like, though, is the ability to alias my phone number. I had an idea a few years ago where your e-mail address (or domain name maybe? I dunno...) could be registerred with a central service. This service would store your phone # and mailing address. If somebody dialed your email address on the phone, it would lookt it up in this database and then route the call. As long as you kept your info up to date, then people would only have to remember your email address to talk to you or send you stuff.
Of course there are privacy concerns and other problems I haven't thought of. It's just that on the surface, it seems like a neat idea. Imagine being able to block individuals this way!
Hmm okay I'm rambling. I just think the digital world has the potential to really make things different for the better. I daydream about it sometimes.
"Derp de derp."
...the European cell network is great because of this kind of crap?
I don't care how cool your GSM network tech is or how easy it is to roam from Spain to Syria, if you have to put up with this kind of BS billing game it's not worth it...
Why not just use your SSN/SIN number? It's not like we have any privacy anyway. This would just be facing the music.
I suppose the cellular providers are worried that customers will jump ship to competitors if they were able to keep their phone numbers. But, when the customers switch, they switch to OTHER cellular providers.... which means that non-customers are just as able to switch TO thier company.
The only valid concern I can think of is that preventing users from keeping their number is that they keep their revenues consistent. If users switched all the time, they wouldn't be as able to dependably predict the next quarter's revenues. Though, I doubt it would fluctuate that much. It leaves them open to being overtaken by better competitors, but it equally allows them to steal away the other guy's users. (I guess they don't have much self-confidence)
That is like saying "buying" is bad and "selling" is good, when they are just two sides of the same transaction.
Recently the company I work for changed from the ILEC to a CLEC that only provided service within our LATA, of course we wanted to keep our existing number. Certain other people were not able to call in, we could call out but they couldn't call us, it turns out companies that used MCI as their IXC were the ones who couldn't call us. MCI had a problem with their LIDB. You are going to need to know this stuff to diagnose these problems. And you think service is bad now
Free cell phone tracking
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:
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
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
perhaps i'm just paranoid, but wouldn't this make trcking people by a single number (by the government, the people pushing for this initiative) much more easily automated?
i assume this eternal number would be optional, but the number of people who would do it for convenience alone would save a lot of time for info trackers.
eh?
As I said, it seems like a silly concept. But think back. If you havn't said it yourself, I'm sure you might know someone that said "I'd change carriers...but then I'll have to track everyone down and tell them my new number". The same sorta holds true for e-mail/ISPs as well. It's a big pain in the ass to change phone numbers...if we didn't have to worry about it, we wouldn't have any problem switching carriers if their service sucked.
Say you were using AT&T Wireless then you switch to Verizon and keep your number. You number is probably still going thru some piece of AT&T since, technically, they control the number range into which your number falls.
So you have a problem such as you can't receive calls. You call your current carrier, Verizon who says the problem is with AT&T since your number falls into their range. You call AT&T who says they are not your carrier so they can't help you. And back and forth you go...
I think I'd rather deal with a number change.
Especially for those of us in states with No-Call lists (or possibly the National No-Call list if it ever comes to pass). Opt-out once and you're off the list for good. Oh, wait. These two ideas are probably opposed for the same reason by the telemarketing industy's lobby.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
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.
Sounds interesting. What do you get for referring customers, sorehands? Or should I call you "refer_id=5938p911"?
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.
> (one number for life... the ultimate!)"
/. is about privacy - NOT having one number...
But the next story on
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein