Re: [Tagging] [Key:phone] - Suggesting wiki page changing

[Valor Naram]

So we're good to keep `phone:mobile` for mappers who know if the number is a mobile one or landline.

We can keep `phone:mobile` for explicit ones where you can say to 100% this is a mobile phone number and will be *generally* charged as such.

Cheers

Sören Reinecke alias Valor Naram

PS: Don't be confused. I do not even bother, if we differenciate between mobile numbers and landlines or not.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Tagging] [Key:phone] - Suggesting wiki page changing
From: Paul Allen
To: "Tag discussion, strategy and related tools"
CC:

On Wed, 25 Sep 2019 at 09:04, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't see the problem, can you explain?

[Note: some simplifications ahead.  Broadly true but there are many exceptions in

reality.]

In the UK, calling rom landlines, calls to mobile numbers are more expensive than calls

to landlines.  These days, not by much but in the past the difference was large.  BT's prices are

a 23p call setup charge then 15p/minute to landlines and 18p/minute to mobiles.  Unless you

have one of their packages that give you free calls to landlines (not even a setup charge) but

9p/minute to mobiles (with the 23p setup).

There are no guarantees that this won't change in the future:  Maybe for the better, maybe for the

worse.

If you're calling from a mobile phone then the charging situation is complex.  Depending on

which MNO or MVNO you're using, it may be very complex (although it's not as bad as it used

to be).  Generally it has been the case in the past that if you were calling from a mobile it was

cheaper to call another mobile than a landline,  These days there's either no difference or

it's small, but that could change.

Fortunately, in the UK, mobile numbers start with a 7 and non-mobile numbers do not (other

potentially-expensive calls have different prefixes).

The situation is different elsewhere in the world, of course.  In the US it's the callee, not

the caller, who pays the call charges for calls to mobiles.  Oh the joys of living in a country

where you not only get junk advertising calls on your mobile, but you have to pay to receive

them.

By the way, this is not about Italy. In Germany [1] and likely in many other places you can also get your landline number on a mobile phone. I'm using a German landline number for almost 20 years on my desktop and for 10 years on my mobile. It is not new technology, and it can be used everywhere, not just in Italy.  Another possibility would be call redirect. No way to tell where a number will be routed to (if you aren't a telco).

Number remapping, of one form or another, has been around for a long time.  But 20 years ago

it was expensive and rare.  After regulations requiring number portability for mobile owners

switching between carriers, the technology became cheaper to implement.  I'm not sure if UK

companies offer anything other than redirection when it comes to terminating a landline on a

mobile or a mobile on a landline but if they do I'd expect call charges to be appropriate to

the number prefix.

So people do find it useful to know if a phone number is to a landline or a mobile.  Less so

than in the past, because the cost difference is smaller, but still useful.  However, in the UK

we can tell by inspecting the number: if it starts with a 7 it's a mobile.  So in the UK we don't

need a tag to tell us.  This isn't true of all countries: in the US you can't tell if you're calling

a landline or a mobile, but you don't care because the person receiving the call is paying.

--

Paul

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