phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

Fri Apr 15 08:49:37 UTC 2016

On Thursday, 14 April, 2016 16:32, "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell at ufp.org> said:

> So maybe 10% of all cell phones are primarly used in the "wrong" area?

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a good pointer to the history of how / why US mobile ended up in the same numbering plan as fixed-line?

Over here in the UK we had a very different approach where mobile phones went into their own area codes from the start, hence no confusion as to what type of device you were calling, and it was trivial to put the increased cost of the call on the caller.  (It's *incredibly* rare, if not non-existent, here for the mobile user to pay for incoming calls or SMS).

Of course, we got our own set of problems once number portability kicked in - a lot of operators had set up "free / cheap on the same network" tarrifs, which was easy while you knew for sure that 07aaa nnnnnn was Orange but 07bbb nnnnnn was O2.  Once you could take your number with you to another network, it became a lot more guesss-work as to how much you were going to be billed for any given call...

Regards,
Tim.