Come November, mobile phone numbers will be portable, meaning you can keep your same number even if you switch carriers. And thus the advertising has begun.
Fortunately my contract with Sprint PCS is up in November. I’d like to switch service, but I’m not really inclined to buy a new phone since my current one is only a little over a year old. Sprint PCS has a great price for a national plan, but only if you don’t need a lot of anytime minutes. And I swear, no matter where I’ve lived, I always get the worst reception in my own house or apartment.
According to that article the cell phone market in the U.S. is saturated. 154 million people (54% ) have cell phones, and those that don’t have bad credit.
Much less advertised (I hadn’t heard of it until now) is the ability to transfer a phone number from a landline to a mobile phone, and vice versa (though the latter seems unlikely to occur much). So not only are the wireless companies being forced to compete more amongst themselves, they also have to compete with the traditional phone companies. (Though let’s not forget that some of those wired companies own some of those wireless companies.)
But there’s a hangup on how local phone numbers are assigned. The area code and prefix you get from a wired company is very tightly determined by your geography. Not so with wireless. Each wired and wireless company has an allotment of numbers they can give out.
The issue, which both landline and wireless carriers have asked the FCC ( news -web sites ) to clarify, is whether local phone companies must also hand over a landline number to a cellular company that doesn’t already have similar numbers from the same rate center.
I didn’t think this was such a big deal. But, as/if the wireless market grows, I expect one day I’ll hear “We’re sorry, we no longer have any Minnesota phone numbers left. We’ll have to assign you one from North Dakota.”
