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back to article Ofcom mulls popular number charge

Ofcom is considering charging companies which want numbers in popular area codes, and getting rid of local phone dialling to eke out the existing number ranges. The two measures are open to consultation until February next year. They are designed to provide more local phone numbers - which are running critically short - by …

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  1. M7S

    Incentive for the operators to stuff the customers

    "You're in a block that's not heavily used at this time, so we are going to return it to Ofcom as we dont want to pay the new fee. Give us thousands of pounds not to do so, as it will cost you ten times that to change all your stationary, headed paper, advertising material and notify all your customers of the new number. Dont think about a simple re-direct as we wont have the number to put an automated message onto for you. Thank you for choosing [your telecoms company] today"

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Here we go

    The authorities have made a pigs arse of every numbering change they've implemented, and Ofcom in its brief existence has shown an above average lack of talent in their attempts to make premium rate, free etc etc make any sense. All any of these clever schemes have done is muddy the water - while I know pretty much which number ranges are likely to be expensive, the variations within a range can be massive.

    There are only two things Ofcom consider any good; market forces and making people pay for things. Apparently this magical thinking is all it takes, only it doesnt work, which is why some companies are hording vast swathes of spectrum.

    Applying the same to numbering will guarantee two things; consumers will pay more for phones, and companies will force phone number changes on users to add miniscule amounts to their bottom lines. As ever the unintended consequences of Ofcoms primary school intellect will fall directly in our lap, and the fix is sure to take a lot longer than the original fuck up.

    They'd probably have more luck getting it right by soliciting suggestions from a primary school class and choosing one at random.

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  3. Alex Brett

    Number blocks

    The issue is the system the UK uses for number routing - communication providers (CPs) get allocated a 1000-number block, and other CPs then send any calls for that block to the particular CP. Aside from the number wastage problem, it also makes porting difficult - we have to use a system called onward routing which means the CP who 'owns' the number block (the donor CP) forwards calls to a ported number on to the CP who now has that number. Porting a number that has already been ported then gets even more complicated as you can imagine!

    Internationally the UK is actually held up as an example of how not to do it - if (like most countries now) we had a central database then porting gets much simpler (just update the relevant DB entry), and you no longer have to issue 1000 number blocks - you can do much smaller allocations (even down to single numbers) without problems. CPs can also return numbers they no longer need. It even has the benefit that you can specify multiple ways to connect a call, so a VoIP provider calling another VoIP providers number can keep it pure VoIP rather than having to go via the PSTN.

    Unfortunately, it's the large carriers like BT who will likely be against this, as it would end up quite expensive for them to adapt all their systems to do this central lookup rather than onward routing, and have very little benefit for them. Being the large carriers, they have a lot of influence with Ofcom etc, so it's likely nothing is going to happen in the short term...

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