nanog mailing list archives
Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences
From: "John R. Levine" <johnl () iecc com>
Date: 15 Apr 2016 10:51:45 -0400
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?
The US and most of the rest of North America have a fixed length numbering plan designed in the 1940s by the Bell System. They offered it to the CCITT which for political and technical reasons decided to do something else. (So when anyone complains that the NANP is "non-standard", you had your chance.) Fixed length numbers allowed much more sophisticated call routing with mechanical switches than variable length did. For reasons not worth rehashing, there was no possibility whatsoever of adding digits or otherwise changing the numbering plan. So if they were going to do caller pays mobile, they'd need to overlay mobile area codes on top of existing codes, and there weren't enough spare codes to do that. Putting mobiles into a handful of non-geographic codes as they do in Europe wouldn't work because the US is a very large country, long distance costs and charges were important, and they needed to be able to charge more for a mobile call across the country than across the street. (The distance from Seattle to Miami or Boston to San Francisco is greater than Lisbon to Moscow or Paris to Teheran.) In the US, mobile long distance charges have mostly gone away, but my Canadian mobile still charges more for a call to a different province than one to the same city. So rather than doing caller-pays as in Europe, North America does mobile-pays, with the mobile user charged for both incoming and outgoing calls. There turn out to be good economic reasons for that -- European mobile users imagine that incoming calls are "free", but in fact they are very expensive to the caller because the caller has no say in choosing the carrier or the price. For all its faults, the competition in US mobile service drove down prices much faster than in Europe, and US users use more minutes/month than Europeans do. If you want me to call you in the UK, I'm happy to call your landline for 1.3c/min, not so happy to call your mobile at 26c/min. ObNanog: E.164 and VoIP don't make this any easier. R's, John
Current thread:
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences, (continued)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Leo Bicknell (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Gary Buhrmaster (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Josh Reynolds (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Larry Sheldon (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Larry Sheldon (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Larry Sheldon (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences John Levine (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Owen DeLong (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Laurence F. Sheldon, Jr. (Apr 14)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences tim () pelican org (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences John R. Levine (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences tim () pelican org (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Nikolay Shopik (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Mark Andrews (Apr 15)
- Re: [lists] Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Peter Beckman (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Owen DeLong (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences David Barak via NANOG (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Mark Andrews (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Jean-Francois Mezei (Apr 15)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences Baldur Norddahl (Apr 17)
- Re: phone fun, was GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences John Levine (Apr 15)