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Carriers Might Profit From Cell Number Portability
Makarand writes "Carriers that are adding cell-number portability fees to your monthly
cell phone bills (while fighting against actually implementing the requirement) may actually rake in profits from these levies as the total amounts collected will be more than the projected costs of meeting the FCC's
number portability requirements. Although federal law requires that such fees be 'just and reasonable', it
does not require reporting of their actual expenses. Consumer advocates feel that
the number portability verification processes required are similar to those used by long-distance phone companies when a customer switches from one service provider to another and there is little reason to believe that expenses to meet portability requirements should vary widely among carriers and be so excessive as to bring profits for the carriers."
The portable cell numbers came to use in Finland just a month ago. The result was a furious fight between the operators fighting for customers: free radio phones, DVD players etc. if you became their customer. But then one of the operators realized it's better off to give benefits for existing customers. They lowered prices for the weekend and started a campaign saying "Our customers are doing better". I think that's the right way to go. I don't want to be switching my cell phone operator all the time. So in the end, customers really did benefit from the change.
... here in the Netherlands you only pay about 20 Euro *once* for the number portation to your new GSM provider.
"Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me."
Here in the UK number porting takes a couple of weeks with no paper work and no fee. The competition between networks is so intense that the mobile telcos are desperate to make it easy for people to change from one network to the other.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
And I don't have to sign up for plans that commit me to spending $[some_large_number] per month; just a flat rate per 30 seconds.
Well,
Complain to your regulator and your competition authority. At least in Germany they have some serious teeth.
There is no technical reason whatsoever for the operators not to use ISDN call divert (or the equivalent mapping for this service in SS7 terms) as a mechanism for transfering the call to the new destination. In this case the only time when the call travels to the premises of the old operator is when it is set up. The actual voice (or data) should go directly to the new destination. There is no reason to charge you for the call set up only as for an entire call and there is no reason to route the call through the old operator network.
The fact that the phone operators in Europe do not use this on purpose (it has been in GSM since 1997) is already a part of an investigation by the European comission. More specifically, it is the investigation on unfair roaming charges.
So you are in you right to b*** and should do so. As a result of enough people b*** we may sooner or later get decent roaming charges for roaming mobile to roaming mobile calls so it may be a good idea to be persistent in this.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Why not just have your land line call forward to your cell phone, and tell people to call your land line number? You can switch the # you're forwarding to whenever you get a different cell.
As someone who has still resisted the urge to buy a mobile phone and thus pump an additional $100AU a month into the telecommunication system while spending large portions of my day typing text messages to someone who people who don't want to read with a keypad that is designed to be operated by a lemming, I'm probably not the best person to comment on this story, however . . .
Whats the deal with the keeping the phone number the same for your whole life! (well until we are all electronically tagged at birth in which case you dont have a choice). I like moving house, because it means I get to choose who has my number. It weeds out all those people (work bosses, annoying friends, marketing, etc) that someone managed to get hold of your phone number can no longer bug you.
Look at changing your phone number as exercising your right to privacy!
I pay $2.20 on my bill for "number portability."
I called to let them know that I am dropping them for another carrier at the end of this month, and that I planned on taking my number with me...
They said, and this was a real gas, "We don't offer that service. You'll have to give up your phone numbers if you leave Sprint."
"But you're charging me for number portability!"
"I'm sorry, sir, but you won't be able to keep your numbers"
"Then why are you charging me for number portability"
"Sir, Federal regulations require that we charge the number portability fee"
"..."
I couldn't believe my ears..
Anyone else with Sprint heard the same story? I think that charging a fee for a service one can't utilize comes down to, oh I dunno, fraud...
againt this shows the difference between Europe and the USA. I live in the UK, and number portablity is painless, free, and well organised to the point that people dont even think tiwice about it. Although oftel says 2 weeks at max to transfer, it usually happens within days. cellphoen operators cannot refuse to do it.
:) especially with me being a good revenue costomer for them! :)
more importantly, thanks to the strict regultations, number portability gives an EXTREME amount of power to the users.
For example, if I ever feel that TMobile (my provider) is not performing as well as i expect, i simply threaten to ask for my PAC number (a number provided to port your number) and its suprising how far they will bend back to help you
Have a nice day!
The bigger question is how you ever got to talk to a person?
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
That being said, I have faith in human ingenuity. The folks that persuaded thousands of idiots to order penis enlargement pills should have little trouble working out an effective cell slam scam.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
As recently as four years ago, I went with pulse dialing - as a student, I didn't see the point in paying a couple bucks extra a month for something of so little marginal value.
A little known secret is that even if you signed up for pulse only, touch tone usually worked anyways. These days they'd actually have to do some work to block touch tone, rather than to enable it, as it is so pervasive.
I don't see a charge for touch tone dialing anymore though, so I am assuming this has been rolled into my ridiculous $25/month base service charge.
-josh
> a T-Mobile (GSM) rep slammed an AT&T customer
> (CDMA?), seems to me they'd have to give the slamee a
> new phone.
Technologically, it's doable, but not as easily.
AT&T Wireless uses mostly D-AMPS IS-136, but they're trying to roll-out GSM into their markets because a) D-AMPS sux, and b) the data capabilities of D-AMPS sucks. Cingular is in the same boat as AT&T Wireless.
[Note that, as any anal-retentive RF Engineer will tell you, GSM and IS-136 D-AMPS are both TDMA (i.e., Time Division Multiplexed Access).]
Verizon Wireless, SprintPCS, and ALLTEL use IS-95 CDMA. So it is technologically conceivable that a consumer could get forcibly moved from AT&T Wireless/Cingular/Nextel once the GSM migration is complete. Ditto for Verizon Wireless/SprintPCS/ALLTEL.
The issue is generally the phones are the same, but internal settings in the phone must be changed to change carriers. This would have to be accomplished more than just moving the subscriber information from one service to another (like with long distance), but also reprogramming the settings on the phone.
Don't feel easy yet; cellular service providers have had what they call "Over the Air Programming" (OAP) for years now, so they could send the programming information over the radio control channel to change the phone's settings.
I wouldn't be surprised if as cellular technology continues to mature, users start to get spam short messaging service messages saying something like, "Reply to this message to improve your cellular phone service". If the user replies, they get moved to a new $2.99/minute rate plan with SleazyCell company.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Another thing, AWS is switching to GSM because they can cram more calls into any given channel compared to D-AMPS. It wasn't about quality. There is arguably no difference in sound quality to the end user. It was capacity issue. (Remember the class action suit brought against them a few years back because they oversold service) And as for data, a few telecom equipment companies were working on a data solution for D-AMPS(comparable to GPRS) but stopped development when AWS annouced that they were switching to GSM back in 2000.
And it can piss off the phone company when you refuse to switch over to touch tone. A relative was one of the last people at her CO to switch over to touch tone. The phone comapny was practically begging her to switch over to touch tone so that they could get rid of the old equipment.
I recently decided to switch from Verizon to Cavalier Telephone, a local CLEC. It took me almost two months to complete the transition, including some two weeks where I had no inbound phone service, unless the caller was coming from Cavalier's network (i.e. 0.0001% of the universe). Sparing everyone the gory details, I had problems including:
- Cavalier required me to be at home to tell a technician to cut over from my Verizon line, despite my having told them it was OK at least a dozen times over the phone
- Neither company could explain exactly what was happening with the split-bank on my line, required (at least by Verizon) for DSL. Understanding a that problem and getting it fixed added two weeks to the switchover.
- When Verizon finally claimed it had ported my old number, they didn't bother to change their routing information, leaving me with my lack of inbound service. Neither company had a way of expediting a fix ("That'll be 3 business days, sir"), or even a person or department who specifically dealt with number portability or the like.
I was paying both companies throughout the switch, mainly due to the fact that if I cancelled my Verizon account, the number I was trying to port would have disappeared for good.I was told many times over that neither company had ever experienced such a painful switch; even so, the fact that such a disaster could happen at all tells me that companies aren't paying nearly the attention they should to number portability issues, considering the millions they're raking in from it.
How To Get Humans To Mars
I'm amused by our friends across the pond feeling bad for Americans because they don't have number portability? But do our friends with the silly accents realise the sorry state the US is in when it comes to mobile telecom in general?
Let's begin. The carriers here have no concept of a SIM card. Most phones are CDMA and are firmware locked to the provider. There are only two GSM networks I know of, T-Mobile and AT&T. Tri-band phones from these places cost as much as a Yugo. In addition, AT&T "provider locks" their expensive tri-band phones to only work on AT&T, and will not unlock them, not even for a fee (AT&T, if you're reading this, there are places online that unlock your phones for $20 or less, so screw you). T-Mobile unlocks your phone within 72 hours of being on contract, which is decent, however. Oh but should you wish to get a newer mobile from them, you have to resign a 1-2 year contract...
Oh yes, the contracts! Wait til you hear about these! Everyone's on contract here, because it's too expensive not to be. So here's how it works. You have this allotted quantity of minutes you pay a fixed monthly fee for, then you pay exorbitant rates (40c+ a minute) if you use them up. These quantities are decent, for example, T-Mobile offers 600 minutes, free nights, free weekends, and 500 SMS for $43 (27 quid) without tax. Nice eh? Umm, no, little do you realize how backwards the billing schemes are here. For one thing, minutes from that "600" get deducted for every incoming call. Even SMS get deducted for every incoming SMS sometimes. And 1 second rounding? Try 1 minute rounding. And if you don't use all your minutes in a month? *poof*, gone. Cingular's trying rollover, but since they're not GSM, they don't count. Oh, and should you wish to add or remove the number of allotted minutes to your plan, you have to resign a 1-2 year contract, with a termination fee in the $100 or $200s.
So in short, who gives a crap about number portability? How about we get reasonable plans and GSM phones which take SIM cards, before we worry about switching providers and keeping our numbers? What would you rather do, keep your phone when you switch carrier, or keep your number when you switch carrier? Especially since a decent triband costs hundreds of dollars?
*blinking cursor*