Stuck for a christmas present for the wife December 10, 2010
Posted by Matthew Townend in Uncategorized.add a comment
I received the following from a good friend of mine and thought I would share with my Blog readers:
It all began with an iPhone…
March was when my son celebrated his birthday,and I got him an iPhone. He just loved it. Who wouldn’t? I celebrated my birthday in July,and my wife made me very happywhen she bought me an iPad. My daughter’s birthday was in August so I got her an iPod Touch.
Christmas came around so I got my wife an iRon.
My wife failed to recognise the benefits of this purchase even after i pointed that the iRon can be integrated into the home network with the iWash, iCook and iClean. This inevitably activates the iNag messaging service
Number Porting “Its official UK is now laughing stock of Europe” December 10, 2010
Posted by Matthew Townend in Uncategorized.add a comment
In the last few months I have attended a number of different events where number porting has been discussed, and it becomes clearer that this is potentially the biggest issue facing the VoIP industry and the ability for real broad competition to emerge.
Indeed recently at the Internet Parliament conference Les Oliver of InterConnect Communications highlighted that the UK was held up as the way not to do number porting globally. The issue seems to be both technical and procedural, the system itself was set up when there was 3 to 4 major carriers who had numbers and now we are into the 100s of number holders.
From a procedural point of view each number holder has to enter into a contract with the other party they wish to port with. There is not a standard number porting contract so this can cause both delay and cost as each contract has to be scrutinised, also the people normally only want to enter into these agreements when they have a customer who wants to move to them, so often the other party is very slow and reluctant to put this into place. Also there is an issue with the onward routing process, where if a customer originally took out a service with provider X and then moved to provider Y & even then onto provider Z, if provider X goes out of business and his systems fail then the customer will fail to receive service even though they are now with provider Z.
There has been discussion with various parties about setting up a new IP based number porting environment, and indeed it is thought that this would not cost a great deal of money. However if the larger carriers who still control most of the numbers would not join this it would be kind of pointless, and to be fair there is a large degree of cost involved in them moving to this.
I am hearing from providers and customer ever increasingly frustrating stories about porting and how real business customers are affected, however the only way I think this will be resolved is if OFcom mandate a solution through regulation, or the current system finally completely falls apart and the industry heavy weights are forced to act themselves. Indeed the ability to handle porting well is becoming a real differentiator for the likes of Gamma. In the short term there maybe some band aid put in place with ITSPA attempting to agree a standard contract for its members. I think the industry should ensure this becomes a clearly recognised issue by Ofcom and our MPs.
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