Court Lets Mobile Phone Numbers Follow Customers
from the as-expected dept
As expected, a US Court of Appeals has sided with the FCC and told the various wireless carriers that they do need to get ready for number portability. The wireless carriers had protested, saying that this was unnecessary and there was plenty of competition in the wireless arena already. That's a pretty weak argument, of course. It's pretty easy to find people who haven't switched their mobile phone service simply because they didn't want to lose their number. What will be more interesting, though, is to see the consequences of this move. The simple fact is that almost all carriers have service-level problems, and as people start to switch, they probably won't be too happy with any carrier they end up with. Then, there's the question of how the carriers will respond. Since much of their business model is based on subsidizing the phone purchase and trying to keep their customers for long periods of time to recoup those costs - I imagine they're going to get a lot more strict about keeping people tied to long term contracts. Sure, if you must switch carriers, you'll be able to, but be prepared to pay a huge "termination" fee.
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No Subject Given
I had a Sprint PCS phone for six years--and this month I finally told them to turn it off.
I had horrible service--one of their towers consistantly dropped my calls--and their customer support said "It's probably overloaded" and that was it. No "Ok--we'll get it fixed", or "I'll send someone out to look at the tower or install a new one", just "Sorry--there are probably too many customers trying to use it at the moment".
The only reason I stayed so long was because everyone had that phone number.
If people have the freedom to switch to other carriers and keep their number, I would have left Sprint a few years ago when this problem came up.
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Aren't we already paying for this?
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The man behind the curtain
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Re: Aren't we already paying for this?
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The technology has NOT been available to the U.S. until about 2-3 years ago. While GSM and CDMA equipments support the feature, it was not compatible with how the U.S. used to allocate blocks of phone numbers. So pratically, mobile number portability could not have been realized until 1000-block pooling was implemented in the U.S. (which happened in 1998/1999 I believe).
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Raise you hand if you've ever moved and had your phone # change.
Was your life ruined?
People, we can't allow this stuff to be Gov't regulated, you're not going to be happy with what it leads to.
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You DOLT!
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