On 13 Jun 2013, at 01:34, "Leo Vegoda" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Jun 12, 2013, at 3:20 pm, Clive D.W. Feather <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Christian de Larrinaga said: >>> The spineless attitude in Ofcom to porting is seriously inadequate in my >>> humble opinion. >>> >>> There should be a national porting service that ENUM like would manage >>> the routing without having to ingress into a legacy supply chain. >> >> We put a lot of work into designing it and finding someone to build and run >> it. Then Vodaphone (IIRC) took Ofcom to court to get it stopped. > > A naïve question from someone who doesn't know much about telephone routing > follows… What happens if the business that originally provided the > transferred number closes its network or stops operations? Does that break > the new provider's service for the number? > > Leo > It can do, yes. Worse, if the number is in a range allocated to the (now) defunct provider, the range goes back to OfCom (eventually) and may be allocated to someone else. OfCom is sympathetic to end user service, and has in the past tried to find a new provider to carry on the service, but it's a complicated mess all round. BT's (and as the encumbent, this really matters) systems seem to struggle a lot with this. Even the new stuff like IP Exchange. Even porting a number from one IPEX customer to another if the CUPID is 1(BT original number) seems like a tortuous manual process, if possible at all. And that's simply a routing change on the same system. I guess BT is between a rock and a hard place. Masses of legacy routing can't help. Being forced to help competitors take business away can't be pleasant. I do feel sometimes though that they hide behind "technical difficulties" more often than they should, but there's little commercial incentive for them to improve the system. If I was the PSTN, I wouldn't have started from here. :) Mike
