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TA96 rules mandate number portability. But you can't port a number outside of a rate centre. To put it simply, to port a number to a new carrier, the carrier ha

TA96 rules mandate number portability. But you can't port a number outside of a rate centre. To put it simply, to port a number to a new carrier, the carrier has to be able to pick the call up somewhere, by way of the appropriate connections to the incumbent's "tandem" offices (think of it as a kind of hub for the spokes that are Bell central offices). The underlying PSTN origination supply chain for the VoIP industry consists of a small oligopoly of CLECs at this point (e.g. Level3, Bandwidth.com, Verizon Business, Onvoy and all the companies they bought, etc.) and they don't necessarily have the interconnections and footprint in these same markets — most especially not the "Tier 3" plus rural markets.

Zenst 9y ago
So they end up locking you into a call forwarding service, which entails you end up paying for them to do very little, with any maintenance liability already covered by existing liabilities. Starting to see why they wanted the change now.
- abalashov 9y ago
  Pretty much, yeah. For a CLEC, interconnecting in any given LATA[1] is a complex and costly endeavour—I mean the actual interconnecting, not opting into an interconnection agreement (ICA) for one purpose or another. CLECs are not beholden to any universal service obligations or similar social policy objectives, and will only connect in higher-density metro-type markets in which there is profit in doing so. The business case has to be there, and that generally comes in the form of downstream VoIP service providers having customer demand in that area. So, hyper-rural folks are deeply out of luck. We deal with this scenario all the time in my line of work: "hey, anyone know someone who can port a number in this $LOCAL_YOKEL territory out in $NEVER_HEARD_OF_IT?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_are...

Zenst 9y ago

So they end up locking you into a call forwarding service, which entails you end up paying for them to do very little, with any maintenance liability already covered by existing liabilities. Starting to see why they wanted the change now.

abalashov 9y ago
Pretty much, yeah. For a CLEC, interconnecting in any given LATA[1] is a complex and costly endeavour—I mean the actual interconnecting, not opting into an interconnection agreement (ICA) for one purpose or another. CLECs are not beholden to any universal service obligations or similar social policy objectives, and will only connect in higher-density metro-type markets in which there is profit in doing so. The business case has to be there, and that generally comes in the form of downstream VoIP service providers having customer demand in that area. So, hyper-rural folks are deeply out of luck. We deal with this scenario all the time in my line of work: "hey, anyone know someone who can port a number in this $LOCAL_YOKEL territory out in $NEVER_HEARD_OF_IT?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_are...