On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 12:38 -0400, Richard Siddall wrote: > I was basing it on some of the explanatory pages on the FCC site, not > the underlying orders. (Of course, when I did a web search to try to > find a reference to reply to Steve, I couldn't find the pages.) > > I'm 99.9% sure a couple of months back I saw a PDF on the FCC site that > used the term "speculation" when talking about toll-free numbers, but it > doesn't show up in Google now. >
Ok, then its likely that what I found was it, because I googled with 'speculation' as well, since that was the term that you provided. To answer someone elses email, yes its almost identical to domain squatting, and in some cases it has painful responses. There are some who like the domain squatters will query SMS/800 for recently available numbers, and will yank them asap. In one case a rape crisis hotline was shut down, a week later it was a porn line, not good for those calling. Basically the FCC feared that people would get good tollfrees, those that spell something, or all 0' or ... "cherry numbers" and would start inflating the prices of them, just as domain names have been done, and selling them off. They do not want the numbers themselves to be a commodity traded that way, basically company X needs to sell all their tollfrees for the same price, and not charge a premium for '800' where '888/77/66/55' are discounted, if they get 800-something that is salable as the name they shouldnt do that as well. To get around this 2 main methods have been done it seems. There are probably others, but ... A combo package of the telephone number, domain name that matches, and all that are sold. In this way the phone number is not sold at a premium, the extra money comes from the matching domain name, and all that. The other way is to form 2 companies, one that only does the "cherry numbers" and all of them are highly priced. This way is a bit more sketchy. Come to think about it I havent seen either of these two advertised in 3 or so years, so maybe there was a crackdown against it. It used to be regularly that I would see this. Of course this does not stop a canadian company from doing the same thing, after all the tollfree pool is the same between countries, more or less, and the FCC can only make US based orders. > I was looking into this as our original toll-free number started getting > a lot of calls for a long distance phone card provider with a different > toll-free prefix. HA what a place to do a "early media" advert for services. Early media means no answering supervision so no per minute charges (why american idol vote lines operate that way). You can then advertise better rates or whatever and capture some customers. Its their fault for calling the "advert line" instead of the number they wanted :) -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel Belfast +44 28 9099 6461 US +1 516 687 5200 http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you! _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz