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Cell Phone Number Portability Ruling
Ken@WearableTech writes "Checking the Court's Opinion site every day has paid off. Verizon's action on the FCC's number portability ruling was dismissed by the D.C. Court of Appeals. The court found that Verizon had waited far too long to bring the challenge and it also sided with the FCC's interpretation of the Law rather than Verizon. Barring any other action we may see number portability this year. Unfortunately, Verizon is already lobbying to have the law changed. But it was also nice to see Cingular was on the FCC's side of the case."
Excuse me, why are you telling me that Hell is hot? Why should I care?
PS: fist post fools
For the amount of money the cellphone companies have collectively spent on lobbying and fighting court battles, they could have hired a bunch of the out-of-work slashdotters and solved teh problem once and for all.
:)
Oh, it's not _truly_ a technology problem?
--D
Who said you had to keep the same number.. It's not like the law says you can only have one cell phone - if all else fails, start a new number before you cancel the old one!
Verizon is a public corporation. It answers to its shareholders, who's only concern is profit.
If you think they have any interest in "protecting the rights of consumers", boy do I have deal for you on some Packard-Bell desktops.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
That's because they're the underdogs. No kidding they're thrilled- now all those Verizon, AT&T, etc customers have the capability to switch to them. It's already pretty easy to switch off Cingular- they don't lock you into a contract. I would imagine that Nextel stands to loose quite a bit here too, with a large # of business customers(my thought being that business people are less likely to switch #'s) and rather high pricing(though more reasonable recently.)
Frankly, I just wish Cingular would pick a name. They've switched names more than I've switched carriers- Omnipoint->Voicestream->Cingular...arrg.
Please help metamoderate.
like a phone book
problem is if your name is John Chin whats your dns entry going to be?
bite my glorious golden ass.
Glad to see that rationality won out here! All we are talking about is having the facility to deactivate a number on one network and forward it to another network. We are talking about being able to perform a database update, had a packet to another system, and perform another database update. This isn't rocket science. Yes, it is work and will be critical to get it right, but the overall investment should be relatively small. That plus that fact we have been paying for it (check your cell phone bill).
The judge was right, the carriers waited way too long to protest. Now they have to do it or face penalities. I am waiting for November and then it is goodbye Cingular and hello T-Mobile for my Treo (can you say GPRS, world-wide coverage that will let me easily and cheaply use my phone in India and Germany?)! I was waiting for this to happen, because I couldn't/wouldn't give up my number. But every month I cursed Cingular under my breath. I will be first in line to move!
In India, Japan, and I'm sure much of the rest of the world, cell phone portability is the norm, and has been for several years.
Can someone please enlighten this genuinely-curious person as to why it's so much more difficult in the states to implement this? A matter of sheer scale? India and Japan have the same order of magnitude of cell phone users as the USA. And I'm sure it's not because of "multiple standards" -- we have multiple CDMA/GSM/PDC carriers in my countries as well.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
The problem has nothing to do with the techinical aspect of it.
But the fact that most people hate changing numbers; and Verizon has 1/3 of all the cell phone customers out there. Basicly they have a huge customer base that would like to try out one of the other carriers, but It is too much hassle.
Plus most of the remaining 2/3's don't have good enough credit for verizon.
For all the other carriers it would be great if they could try and take business away from verizon.
I could care less about number porting, what I do care is AT&T Wireless charges me $1.25 a month so my number can be ported. What crap, I already have to pay enough in taxes.
"Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty..."
I would just like to point out that Verizon is the former Baby Bell. Verizon Wireless is a subsidiary partly owned by Verizon and partly owned by British telecom company Vodafone. Although there is a very strong relationship between Verizion and Verizon Wirless, *they are not the same company*.
And exactly *where* in the Constitution and/or Bill of Rights are we guaranteed the right of keeping our mobile telephone number forever? I don't see the big deal here. People have changed telephone numbers for the past one hundred years, and society as we know it has moved along just fine.
People keep thinking they're entitled to more and more when they're only entitled to three basic fundamental things: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing more, nothing less.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
Most public corps are owened by thousands upon thousands of different people. The only thing that these owners have in common is the desire to see their investment earn a profit. They are not part of the company culture and do not consider themselves responsible for its actions, yet they are in fact the owners! Mix in a few hundred million dollars and you have the capitalistic equivilent of a bumbling, multiheaded giant who roams the planet in search of things to consume.
As for your circular screwing point... yeah, eventually it'll catch up to some of the corps. But many of these companies have holdings that are equal to the GDP of a small country. That's a hell of a lot of interia to try and stop.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Wouldn't it be easy to provide number portability if phone numbers were more of an alias?
If we had an equivalent to DNS for phones, you could have some character string represent your phone, the equivalent of an IP address represent the service contract you have with your provider, and the hardware address represent that particular piece of hardware.
Switching providers while retaining your number (and even your phone if they use the same protocols) would be as easy as switching slashdot.org's internet provider.
Costs Associated with Implementing Portable Numbers, by percent:
10% Tecnical Implementation
90% Lost Business
In other words, "our business model is threatened by new technology, lets lobby to have our business model mandated by law."
Prior Art:
MPAA
RIAA
Microsoft
"Or maybe we should sue someone."
Prior Art:
SCO
Anyone see a trend in the corporate culture?
Read, L
I can't believe there are any physical components involved in a modern wireless phone network. Ports that consist of entries in a database/routing table don't fail.
First, a company has obligations to it's shareholders, period. You can say they should have obligations to the others, and that it may ultimately hurt them to disregard the others, but bottom-line, a corporation's job is to make money and obey the law. Nothing else.
Anti competitive behavior screws all three interests at the same time. It screws the share holder by driving out other legitimate investments. It screws the customer by monopoly rents. It screws the employees by destroying competitive employers.
I'll grant the last two, but since the company doesn't care anyway, it's immaterial. The question is, does anti-competitive behavior screw the shareholders? And the answer, assuming they don't do it illegally, is usually no. MSFT seems to do well by it. Utilities do fine. Fact is, the only time it hurts them is if/when they lose the monopoly and they don't know how to compete. But at that point, they've lost anyway so it doesn't matter.
Anti competitive behavior also leads to stagnation, which screws all three intersts again by blocking legitimate industry growth.
Well, again, industry stagnation is a great thing if you have a monopoly - it allows you to maintain revenue without spending money on R&D. Again, MSFT. Detroit automakers in the 70's before Japan moved in (oligopoly instead of monopoly, but worked the same). Works out great. If you're on top, the best thing you can do is freeze the conditions of the game. Hell, that's just common sense, and any CEO who wouldn't do everything in their power to maintain a functional monopoly is an idiot.
I'm not saying this is my worldview of how things should be, but rather how they are. I think the world would be a great place if companies were led by caring, touchy-feely CEO's, but that doesn't make money so it won't happen. I know we all want good ethics to be good business and vice-versa, but wanting it doesn't making it so, and crafting arguments to support that position doesn't make it any more so either. Fact is, our system isn't one that's set up to foster kindness.
And for what it's worth, if you want to see badly treated employees, find a company in a competitive market with razor-thin margins - they're forced to treat their customers *so well* they have no resources to treat employees well even if they wanted. So it could be said that big, bloated monopolies have the best chance, if not the inclination, to treat their employees very well.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
This may have been the original plan, but look at it now: the cellphone vendors get to charge extra roaming/long distance fees when you use your phone outside the 'home area', and double charge on intra-network calls. That and the round up to the next minute plan all brings in bonus $.
I am so looking forward to getting a decent phone and decent service when I return to europe.
-steve