North American Network Operators Group

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Re: EU Official: IP Is Personal

  • From: Andy Davidson
  • Date: Fri Jan 25 07:05:13 2008



On 25 Jan 2008, at 10:42, Roland Perry wrote:

In article <[email protected]>, Matt Palmer <[email protected] > writes
Tunnels all over the place seems like the only way it'd even be halfway practical. It's more-or-less how phone number portability works anyway, from what (little) I know.
I don't know about the USA, but in the UK it's done with something similar to DNS. The telephone system looks up the first N digits of the number to determine the operator it was first issued to. And places a query to them. That either causes the call to be accepted and routed, or they get an answer back saying "sorry, that number has been ported to operator FOO-TEL, go ask them instead".

Not quite, the simplistic overview is that operators have an obligation to offer porting wherever practical, so operate ports on a accept-then-forward principal. If I port my number from CarrierA to CarrierB, then my calls still pass through A's switch, who transits the call to B without charging the end user.



For the benefit of completeness, the regulator has mandated that this situation must change, as CarrierB's inward-port customers are not protected from the technical or commercial failure of CarrierA. The industry [www.ukporting.com] has responded and is building a framework to support all-call-query style lookups to handle number ports.


Best wishes,
Andy