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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."
It doesn't appear to be tecnically challenging to allow numbers to remain the same. Change an entry in a database and there you go. This will increase competition, not decrease it.
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http://www.hellection.com
At first, Verizon was protecting the rights of the consumers by fighting RIAA but now they are going against the consumers by fighting a law backed my congress that was against the consumers by helping RIAA expect recently introduced a bill by a senator to help the consumers...
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I want phone number portability so that I can switch from Cingular's towers to Verizon's. Verizon has much, much better customer support and reception where I live. Don't they think they're going to win here?
Of course, they're also much more expensive, but...
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Why doesn't Verizon just charge a number portability fee like the land-line phone companies do? Is the FCC or the courts stopping them? If there only argument against portability is cost why don't they pass the cost off to the customers? Then Cingular can capatalize on it w/ a No Portability Charge ad campaign since they seem to be in favor of protability. Works for everyone...except maybe customers.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Why did the US decide to keep it so that cell phones shared numbers with landline area codes, unlike other countries, such as India, who have dedicated cell area codes? It is so impractical because cell phone numbers are constantly changing, whereas landline numbers are not. Even with this new law, people still move around, and wouldn't mind keeping the same cell number, esp. when they have a billion minutes...
What is up with verizon, they complain about everything, they lobby'd to get deregulated, promising that if that happened they would provide data services to homes, that happened, and Verizon backed out of that and refuse to push out data services. Now they are bitching about number portability... Odds are this has nothing to do with cost, the only reason is because if they did enable it, most of their customers would jump ship, because their pricing, and customer service is the worst, of anything, cell provider, phone provider, data services, they are always rated the worst.
Its time someone bitch slapped Verizon. They are only fighting for their own survival, and still raking in the money for poor services.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
The law has been on the books since 1996 and was supposed to take effect no later than 1999, but the FCC has deferred implementation repeatedly for years. However, the FCC has said repeatededly that they will not defer implementation again and I'm becoming more optimistic that number portability will actually become real in Nov. (Rather than renewing my contract with AT&T (for another free new phone) as I've done for 4 years just to keep the same number, I'm holding off till Nov or till I hear that the law is deferred again. If the FCC doesn't defer again, GOODBYE AT&T!!!!!)
Another important point is that the cell phone companies have been adding fees for a couple of years now with the excuse to the FCC being "upgrading their systems" to support portability. They can't have it both ways, asking us to pay fees to support portability and then not give us portability.
Why do I h8 apple?
While I agree with the ruling, it would be nice to have a DNS-like system for telephone numbers. Map names to numbers, allow the numbers to change while the name stays the same.
That's a poor excuse for unethical behavior and it does not lead to profits. When you see reasoning like that, sell out, quit and don't buy what they are selling. Someone else will do it better eventually.
A company has obligations to it's shareholders, it's customers and it's employees. Any company that decides to screw one of those three interests for the others will get around to screwing everyone. When you think it's OK to screw people, you screw everyone.
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. Anti competitive behavior also leads to stagnation, which screws all three intersts again by blocking legitimate industry growth.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Wireless adoption has, to be sure, grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. I remember my first cell phone at the end of '97. I was headed off to college and I picked up a Nokia 252 (Verizon Wireless, in VT). Aside from the general lack of good deals on plans it was still a relatively new deal for most people. Seeing what you get now it quite impressive in comparison, but it's crazy you're so locked with one provider.
The two issues I think are number portability as well as the fundamental fact that you still pay for incoming calls. The wireless industry has claimed essentially we don't want it, which is quite silly. I'm glad the FCC won this time, because I'm somewhat unhappy with my current carrier. Since switching to digital at the beginning of '99, I have kept the same number. I want to move to another carrier but, like many, I have an established number that I want to keep. Use an online voicemail service as my home number and it's great not getting solicitors waking me up at 7am. Switching to a provider with better coverage in my area will make my life so much easier- and I keep my number!
I always give out my cell phone number as my contact number. I have gotten one telemarketer in 4 years on the cell phone, compared to daily calls on the landline (which number I never gave out, I have Verizon to thank for that).
The thing is, it is illegal to make telemarketing calls to cell phones (since it costs the recipient money). My theory is that the telemarketers have a "block list" of area code/exchanges that are used by the cell companies.
SPAM
They are already portable. My girlfriend works at a certain 3-letter telecommunications company striving back towards profitability, and wireless carriers have been LNP (local number portability) capable since November 2002. This is when they started donating number blocks on a voluntary basis (used to be in counts of 10,000, but is now in counts of 1000) to the number pool. All carriers (who have needed them) have received wireless numbers from the pool, and have donated them into the number pool when necessary. Pooling has been going on since 1998 on a voluntary basis (and is impossible unless the number is LNP-capable), this means that all the carriers basically put the numbers in a pool (very inventive name, eh?) and take them as they need them. And yes, number porting can be done while the number is "live", or already assigned to someone.
;-)
They are stalling because they're worried they'll lose customers due to bad service. Hmm, wonder why that is???
Verizon has the largest wireless footprint in the US while AT&T and others do not work well once you're away from the interstates.
You definately dont want to pay the national roaming network.
I was refering to the sense of entitlement that companies who are dependant on an anticompetative business model. The lowering cost of infrastructure that Open Source and Free Software enables threatens businesses that previously could count on a "locked in" customer base.
OTOH, the portability of cell phone numbers is likely to cause customers to gravitate towards the company that owns the largest network. Perhaps cell phone number portability would create competition only in a market where the towers and network were owned by companies not offering the service to end users, but were charging the service providers for access to a market.
It seems that these businesses are willing to do anything to retain thier customer base except for offer better terms to thier customers. Cingular (T-Mobile, VoiceStream, whatever) is beginning to show a similar attitude to thier customers as they increasingly own a larger portion of the SMS network. When they own 80% or more of the towers in a given market, they can afford to act as a monopoly.
--qtp
Read, L