More on Wireless Local Number Portability

[SU-News]

Come November 24th, it is expected that 9 to 12 million mobile phone users will be shopping for a new wireless provider. What makes this date so attractable is that you can keep your phone number and take it with you to a different carrier. What else is expected in regards to churn rate and consolidation of the wireless companies? WirelessNewsFactor (http://wirelessnewsfactor.com/perl/story/22541.html) speculates further.

[alxrdrck]

I'm a Telecommunications major at Michigan State, and we were discussing this in class last week. My professor expects the number portability implementation to cause massive chaos beyond a lot of extra churn. As it stands, the area code-exchange code pairs used by your mobile phone are specific to your provider. That means that the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network, you probably knew that though) needs only look at the first six digits of your number to route it to Sprint. Under the number portability standard, the PSTN must now go to a centralized lookup database, search it for the number, get the network data, then route the call. If the entry in that dbase (like a DNS server in most respects) is off by a single digit, someone else may get your calls, and you may never know it.

Beyond even this annoyance is that being able to change which provider a number is served by leaves the cellular customer open to that nightmare of the phone system: slamming. A renegade phone company can move your number to their company without telling you that they did. In the case of cellular, they will simply end up disabling your phone, but Sprint will recieve a number loss report, and count it as a disconnect. You get a final bill and your credit deposit will not be returned, plus any other early-termination penalties.

Eventually Mr. Powell and friends at the FCC want to make numbers cross-portable from landline to cellular. Good deal? No, this will make mobile phones vunerable to all the problems associated with landlines. For instance, cell phones were previously immune to all telemarketing by law. The DNC registry handles some of this problem, but do you want politicians and push polls using your minutes to campaign to you?

In short, the whole number-portability issue is a good-sounding idea that has not been fully thought through by those in power. I only hope that the disruption to the network is minimal.

-Al