EU Official: IP Is Personal

Fri Jan 25 11:36:34 UTC 2008

On 25 Jan 2008, at 10:42, Roland Perry wrote:

> In article <20080125093035.GH17698 at hezmatt.org>, Matt Palmer <mpalmer at hezmatt.org 
> > writes
>> Tunnels all over the place seems like the only way it'd even be  
>> halfway practical. It's more-or-less how phone number portability  
>> works anyway, from what (little) I know.
> I don't know about the USA, but in the UK it's done with something  
> similar to DNS. The telephone system looks up the first N digits of  
> the number to determine the operator it was first issued to. And  
> places a query to them. That either causes the call to be accepted  
> and routed, or they get an answer back saying "sorry, that number  
> has been ported to operator FOO-TEL, go ask them instead".

Not quite, the simplistic overview is that operators have an  
obligation to offer porting wherever practical, so operate ports on a  
accept-then-forward principal.  If I port my number from CarrierA to  
CarrierB, then my calls still pass through A's switch, who transits  
the call to B without charging the end user.

For the benefit of completeness, the regulator has mandated that this  
situation must change, as CarrierB's inward-port customers are not  
protected from the technical or commercial failure of CarrierA.  The  
industry [www.ukporting.com] has responded and is building a framework  
to support all-call-query style lookups to handle number ports.

Best wishes,
Andy