UK mobile number porting creaks: Arcane system shows its age

"To give Three some credit, once we’d found someone senior enough..."

I've just heard that they've seen their first snow in hell and that pork farms across the country are losing their pigs as they get up to fly.

HOW did you manage that?! Every time I tried to do that when disputing my bill the chap in the Indian call centre just kept saying no.

Why oh why etc.

Surely it's time for the UK to have a Mobile "Transco/Network Rail" that owns all the infrastructure and data and the "carriers" could just be billing agents? As well as sorting this load of old b*ll*cks it'd mean that we'd have consistent carriage over networks and could plan future enhancements in a meaningful way.

Ah the good old days of POTS...

Makes me wonder..

I have problems sending texts to my wife's phone, number ported from Virgin to I think EE, now with Three. My own phone's number went from VM via Tesco/O2 now also with 3. I can receive and respond to texts she sends me. Maybe that's something to do with their routing database too. It's impossible to get any kind of sense from the network(s).

Our company mobile phones were originally on Orange, then ported to Vodafone and are now on EE. Whenever I call EE they try to tell me it's an Orange number and redirect me to a different CS number (likewise, their automated system tries to direct me to Orange CS). I suspect this ungainly system is the reason.

Arcane system or just too many ports?

It would be interesting to plot both the number and cumulative number of ports per annum. As I'm interested in whether the total number of ported numbers is increasing either as a percentage of all numbers or just in simple numerical terms and whether this volume of ported numbers is in itself is causing problems.

We sometimes get this on our work contract. We're large enough to have a half-decent team who can track this sort of stuff down quite quickly.

It’s not what happens in other countries.

So what does happen elsewhere? Have many other countries gone through so many acquisitions & mergers? Enquiring minds & all that.

SMS Black Hole

We have a particular number ported to Three from T-Mobile/EE and have endless problems with SMS messages to it from EE users randomly not being delivered. Seems to happen especially with long (ie. concatenated) text messages. Sometimes "number unavailable" with calls from EE too (when it has full signal,) but that more rarely.

Numerous complaints to Three have gone nowhere (although their staff are generally pretty helpful in their attitude at least) and it is essentially impossible to troubleshoot the issue without a deep technical knowledge of how the mobile networks actually work - which I don't have, and the Three staff you can actually speak to don't either - because there are just so many variables.

Time and location for a start. Problem with the most frequently nearest local mast (which is an EE colocation)? Could be, but there have been problems elsewhere too (so were they colocations too, perhaps?) Is it relevant that the SMS originator is an iPhone on EE? (Three have twice said that they have broad problems with that combination, but without further explanation or any indication of a fix. And in any case, messages have been black-holed from at least one EE Android user.) Is the receiving handset the problem (another thing they like to blame without logical or evidential basis)? Is it an issue with 4G? (Been asked to switch to 3G-only on a few occasions thus far, but there doesn't seem to be any consistent link.)

All very tiresome. Text messages not being delivered can cause real problems. And without the knowledge, we're completely in the dark - can't even try to insist they look into something in particular.

Have they sorted 07777 numbers yet?

Or will I be stuck on the Vodafone network forever?

Apparently the 07777 numbers are just listed in a folder in someone's office.

I know that this might not be perfect but in the US we doing multi ported number differently. If I port a a number from att to T-mobile. ATT and T mobile work it out. IfI then port the number to sprint it goes back to ATT. Then ATT and sprint work it out. The number will always be ATT. If for some reason I stop paying my sprint bill and do not port the number out, the number will go back to ATT.

I had to give up a fairly nice number that I'd had for years cos I thought that was the problem... new number doesn't seem much better tbh. Stop talking about 5G and just get this shite working please!

To put that into perspective

The German fixed line portability scheme involves exchanging porting information between carriers (there are companies which act as intermediates for carriers which only have limited interconnections). Those are stored in databases (or plain text files) and converted to special database files which can be looked up in less than a millisecond. So for every outgoing call a carrier will look up which carrier hosts the number and look up what is the best (read cheapest) way to reach that destination.

When someone ports their number away from one carrier, they are obliged to forward the calls to the new carrier for free for a certain time. That's why carriers charge up to 20 Euros per outgoing number.

You can blame Vodafone for this mess.

Or Ofcom, take your pick.

But as the last time Ofcom tried to clean it up, Vodafone got the courts to strike the (eminently sensible) idea down, I pretty much guarantee Ofcom won't try again.

http://www.catribunal.org.uk/files/Judgment_1094_180908.pdf

Interesting choice of illustration

'Dishonest attractive African American woman reading messages on mobile phone having happy carefree look while her suspicious jealous husband sitting next to her and spying. Infidelity and jealousy' link

Just..

..to be an arse :-)

07973 wasn't issued in 1995. That'll have been 0973. The additional seven came a while after that.

I worked in the industry at the time the porting plan was being developed.

The Wholesale (markets?) part of BT offered a solution where they would hold every number in a database and it would be queried for every call using C7, with the response message from the DB being used by the originating network to then put the call on the appropriate interconnect.

It was rejected by the industry in favour of the current mechanism which was given the name tromboning. The same method is used for fixed line number portability as well - send the call to where it originally would have gone and then route via the history of number ports. It's not terribly efficient and is exactly what the BT folk were predicting would happen back in the early 90's.

You managed to speak to "the wise one"?!!

To give Three some credit, once we’d found someone senior enough she was genuinely interested in the problem, took ownership and got it sorted

The only way I can think you could speak to someone who actually knows stuff is... SHIBBOLEET! Am I right?

Also, is this a problem that could be solved by DNS?

I had exactly this problem when I was with Vodafone back in 2011-2013. I've had the same number since 2000 and it's been ported pretty much everywher. In the Vodafone period, callers kept getting "number not in service" and no amount of support calls resolved it. In the end I had to change networks and I've never had the problem since.

This is the kind of problem you will always get in large, complex, multi-company legacy systems. The real shame is that Vodafone's support people, whilst always friendly and apologetic, didn't seem to have the knowledge to sort it when it occurs.

For the record

The article’s description of how MNP operates is nonsense. Your number is anchored in the network that originally gave you the number and is involved in all Terminating SMS and Voice calls. If you port your number out to another network (B), then network B will usually avoid terminating traffic going through the original (donor) network as it knows it currently hosts your number.

Problems can occur when networks get out of sync - e.g porting from network B to C involves updates in all 3 networks. If one of them fails to update correctly, you will fail to receive calls/texts from that network.

Yes, There are problems with the way it is currently done. Just want to set the article straight.

For the UK market, the likes of Syniverse are used to allow low cost operators to pass a call directly to the final destination network to achieve the lowest cost. They have no involvement in day to day call routing within the UK.