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Phone Numbers Go Locationless
flipper65 writes "Well, it looks like one of the last bastions of the regional Bells is under attack. Now your VoIP provider can give you their own area code and exchange. With the proliferation of broadband and voice services, your land line is now as mobile as your cell phone, and cheaper. Look for this to turn in to a battle royal. The regional bells will not go quietly into that good night."
I subscribe to VoIP and love it. I go on a trip for the weekend (out of the country). I can take my home phone with me.
Here in Yurp, in most countries mobiles have their own area codes (07xxx here in the UK). This means telcos can and do charge for calls to them at a different (higher) rate than traditional landline calls. However, this means the mobile user doesn't pay to receive the call as they do in the USA, where the other operators can't tell from the number alone that the call is going to a cellphone.
Presumably if the US cell operators are savvy they'll be able to offer "no incoming call charge" service plans for people using these new numbering schemes.
I always thought it was a bit bizarre of the US telcos to give geographical numbers to mobile phones.
We've had that since 2003 here in Germany...
The GermanRegTP stopped that arround 3 months ago.
The phonecompanies have been building up to this for the past 15 years or more, making areacodes mandatory even then.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
I read the article (!). And it didnt say anything about area codes. It just said it would be easier to get phone numbers for VOIP phones.
Here in the UK you can now relatively easily get VOIP terminated phone numbers but only in the area code where you live (you need a billing address there). Now within the UK long distance calls are barely priced differently from local calls any more so this is ok.
What we actualyl need is a decent secondary market in VOIP phone numbers terminated in other countries...
I will exchange a London number for a New York number... any takers...
I believe the FCC has (had?) a rule that prevents assigning specific area codes to any "type" of technology. I think this rule was put into place when FAX machines were first put into widespread use. I would assume the logic behind it was to prevent the phone companies from assigning specific charges to specific types of technology.
I believe one of the only wireless-only area codes is 917 in NYC.
Of course, I think my info is a few years old and I thought that I remembered reading that the FCC was gonna change its policy a few years ago. I don't ever remember if that happened though.
You mean have the companies who cry for deregulation (as free enterprise) might have to compete in a free enterprise market.
Imagine a day when the phone company (any phone company) actually has decent service, actually helps you when you call instead of telling you to call another number, actually quits trying to bleed you for every possible cent.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
What an awesome idea..
;)
VOIP SWAP
Trade numbers in countries to effectively get free/cheap(er) calls in that country. I too will swap a london VOIP for a new york one.
jpc, want to go into business? I'm sure people would pay to use the service, kinda like dating but for phones. Phone dating if you will
I think you underestimate people's ability to adjust.
Here in France, all cell phones have a completely separate "area code" that tells you absolutely nothing about location (as it should be, since you could be anywhere). Pizza places don't care. All calls to cell phones cost the same. I'm sure bizarro VoIP numbers will be the same.
As far as expensive wrong numbers, HUH? At this point, an expensive long-distance call in the US is maybe ten cents a minute if you're really getting screwed; how long were you planning on staying on the line for that wrong number?
Having a number that is both supposed to enable people to reach you and is tied to your location is getting more and more silly these days. People move around, and take their phones with them, so location-based numbers are becoming meaningless. You can already get VoIP numbers that have no connection with your physical location, this will just change the choice.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Yes, but the mobile service providers are still nationally based. If I want to call a mobile in another European country, I still have to add the international prefix.
On fixed line, you can move your NY number to LA but you can't move your London number to Berlin.
I was in Chicago in 2000 and though the train system ws good and you had more fast food options, mobile phone uses was way behind. Back in Ireland, my little sister (aged 13 at the time) had a mobile phone, while our relatively affluent American cousins had 1 mobile for the family ( a fairly arcane looking mobile too). Nokia (finland), Siemens (Germany), and Ericson (Sweden) - all big European mobile makers at the time - seemed to have much better market penetration. Ireland has always had "the gift of the gab" do I suppose it always seemed that awy. Maybe it was just Irish people blabbering on about nothing!! I f****** hate mobiles. I get on a bus to go to work and see muppets everywhere exchanging illogical trivialities in my face. It's like being pissed on.
It's becoming more common in Europe to add the international prefix to mobile phone numbers even if you're in the same country. All of my UK numbers are +44nnnnnnnn, as it avoids problems when internationally roaming.
How are non-geographic (e.g. 1-800) numbers routed? Could a similar system not be used to that to provide portability of any number?
(I know in the UK numbers must, legally speaking, be portable between any provider operating in the same area, and that some providers can take a number that's mapped onto their exchange and terminate it anywhere they want, but I'm not sure of the details of how it works or whether a similar system is available in the US)
I just don't get this fuzzing around 'area codes'. Area codes are based on the telco structure of an ordinary phone. I mean: you have to interconnect small phone networks from one state to another (or one country to another, and so and so). That's the 'area code' reason. It simply substitutes the 'operator' of the first days.
If you have a glance at any old days movies, you'll see why we have 'area codes':
-riing -"I want to make a call to chicago" -"yes sir, which is the number?" -blabla
the area code simply allows a machine to do that.
The point is. What do you really want when you call someone?? You just want to talk to that 'someone', you don't want to talk to the 'someone's house', so the phone number is just a synonym (a sort of an id number) of that someone's name. The area codes are just 'routing prefixes', useful for the machine that handles the connection.
Now, if you have a cell phone, that is really not necessary. In fact, in Europe it is handled that way. I'm very surprised of reading here about cell phones with 'area codes'...
Anyway, the voIp just wipes out this last frontier between the machinery you need to talk to someone, and what you need to localize him
Area codes are just dinosaurs waiting to die. have fun.
Well, what happens if you dial 911 (or whatever the emergency services number is in your country) from a cellphone when you're in another city? Simple. The call gets routed to an emergency dispatcher closest to the cellular base you're attached to, and the telco might also forward more detailed location (triangulated position) to the dispatcher, and possibly also the address the cellular phone is registered to. Some phones in the USA also attempt to forward GPS co-ordinates.
With PSTN, you dial the emergency number, the call gets routed to the local emergency dispatcher, who will match caller ID against the installation address for that phone line, and also provides the customer name.
With VoIP, things get a little more complicated. It's far harder to tell geographically where the caller is at the time. The best they could do, based on IP address might be from the ARIN/RIPE/APNIC databases, which may be the ISP address (in another city, or even country).. Or just provide the registered billing address of that VOIP customer. You call it from your phone while on vacation, and the emergency dispatcher thinks you're in another country. Clearly not brilliant. The VOIP providers would have to employ call screeners who work out who/where the caller is before manually routing the calls to the appropriate emergency dispatcher, which causes potentially life-threatening problems.
I recently got a 1-888 number in the US for only 42$ per month (http://www.quantumvoice.com) it's unlimited incoming and outgoing (probably some kind of fair use but so far no trouble yet)
And thanks to the 1-888 toll free bit, it doesn't really matter where your number is.
I'm from the Netherlands and I use this to stay in touch with people I know in the US.
Works like a charm
I think the point is that with the US system, mobile call charges will drop below land line charges but that isn't going to happen other places due to the fact that callers have no choice on the rate to a 3rd party mobile phone company. From Australia I can call the US or UK for AU$.05/min as a standard rate. If I call a US cell phone, it only costs me AU$.05/min while if I call a UK mobile phone its going to be at least AU$.20/min if not several times that.
Vonage has been doing this for over 2 years now. I currently have a New York phone number that is located in Florida, and vice versa.
Work and friends call the New York number to save on long distance fees. Florida work and friends call my local area code number. They are both on the same line. I can pick up the Cisco device that is the VOIP and walk out of the house, plug it into any IP network and get either of those phone call there.
London, Ebiza, Florida, New York, Hawaii, Indo, Costa Rica....so far it has worked any time I have pluged it up and have a working IP.
IP knows nothing about area codes......
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
The smaller VoIP operators in the UK are issuing numbers beginning with 0870. These are non-geographic numbers which are charged at the basic long-distance rate from wherever you call. However, since these calls are excluded from the discounts offered by most carriers on regular long-distance calls, there is some (small) surplus revenue which gets shared with the VoIP service provider and which pays for some of their costs. Change provider, lose your number as that revenue stream gets choked off.
There is also a block of numbers with the 07 prefix allocated for "personal" numbers - numbers that follow you to wherever you happen to be. These are charged at mobile rates, which accounts for their relative lack of uptake: you might as well have a mobile phone in your pocket than keep redirecting the "personal" number to your nearest landline as you move about.
A new block of numbers has provisionally been allocated for VoIP, but apart from BT, no-one really seems yet to be using it.
However, the point about all of these numbers is that they cost more to call than a regular landline. Some cost more than others, but they all cost more.
Part of this is due to the fact that the telephone network is built to map numbers to physical equipment. There can be several local telephone service providers in the same geographic area and they're required to allow customers to move their numbers between competitors. The only way this can happen is for the calls to go to the network which orginally allocated the number and for it then to be bounced on to the new terminating network: this is a cost to the network with whom the customer is no longer doing business.
The same technological constraint applies to non-geographic numbers: someone has to own and operate the terminating equipment for the dialled number and then relay the call on to a "genuine" landline. However, in this case, the telco gets to charge for its services. Which is why the calls cost more.
The same thing is true for landline calls to VoIP numbers: they have to go to terminating equipment somewhere and hop off onto the IP network. If you want to change your provider and keep your number, someone has to pay to keep that terminating equipment in place. That someone is probably you.
Of course, it would be possible to re-engineer the phone networks so that the whole of the number you dial is looked up to make the routing decision rather than the first few digits, but look back a few years at the problem of growing Internet routing tables and remember why CIDR was invented.
The real solution is an alpha keypad you can type your domain name on...
I live in the states and have a number in my old homeland the UK using VoIP. lingo.com can let you have numbers in many coutries around the world. Also on a side note, SBC have been calling me twice a day trying to get me back, but I have a handy feature of diverting calls from specific numbers. They now call themselves twice a day :)
Nor would I want them to. Where I live, my phone service is, and has always been, much more dependable than any form of high speed Internet service that I have ever tried. I've still got an old, rotary dial phone stashed away, so even if the power goes out, I can still make phone calls. For VOIP to work you need power and you need a live high speed internet connection. A standard phone line and rotary dial phone requires neither. I'd rather pay a little extra for a standard line that I know will be there if I need it than save a few bucks but be screwed if the power goes out (which happens from time to time where I live) or if my Internet connection goes down, or both.
Actually, you can do this already... I moved to Sri Lanka temporarily (for 6 months) from California. I already had VOIP service from Packet8 (www.packet8.net) and all I had to do is take my Packet8 DTA to Sri Lanka, get ADSL for $20 a month, and I make free calls to all my friends and family in the USA. Like wise, my friends and family could dial my US number and it rings here! Wow, the joys of technology :-) Sound quality has been great, usually better than what you get with a calling card. When the ADSL connection gets really bad, the voice quality drops a bit and under those conditions, some have told me about a slight echo. Overall, I've been very pleased with the quality of the service.
By the way, when the tsunami hit and the phone system got jammed, the only thing that worked was the ADSL connection, so I could call my friends and family over my VOIP line let them know I was safe.
Number portability across telco service providers is a great thing, extending that portability to the area code is better.
But it shows just how dated the whole "telephone number" mapping between integers to phones is getting.
What I'd like to see is the whole number thing get completely submerged in the same way that IP addresses were submerged by hostnames and DNS. This is already happening at the personal level, as I speed dial "3" or select a name in my phone's memory. If I could key in "Fred's Restaurant, Sydney" and get a directory lookup returned to my phone that would be nice. Unfortunately, my cell phone company likes the status quo of charging me for voice based directory lookups.
The other thing: something like TLS based authentication for CallerID, with inverse directory lookups in my favorite RBL on "Citizens for Responsible Exploitation", etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You're confused about what pisses Vonage off. They get mad if you use too many minutes on a so-called "unlimited" residential plan. They don't care at all where you use your minutes or where you plug in your box.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
nice Dylan Thomas reference in the summary there... "The regional bells will not go quietly into that good night."
Karma: Can there be a void?
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