[asterisk-biz] Any Cellular Phone Related Businesses in CanadaInterested in Call Transfers?

[Trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 12:38 -0400, Richard Siddall wrote:
> I was basing it on some of the explanatory pages on the FCC site, not 
> the underlying orders.  (Of course, when I did a web search to try to 
> find a reference to reply to Steve, I couldn't find the pages.)
> 
> I'm 99.9% sure a couple of months back I saw a PDF on the FCC site that 
> used the term "speculation" when talking about toll-free numbers, but it 
> doesn't show up in Google now.
> 

Ok, then its likely that what I found was it, because I googled with
'speculation' as well, since that was the term that you provided.  To
answer someone elses email, yes its almost identical to domain
squatting, and in some cases it has painful responses.  There are some
who like the domain squatters will query SMS/800 for recently available
numbers, and will yank them asap.  In one case a rape crisis hotline was
shut down, a week later it was a porn line, not good for those calling.

Basically the FCC feared that people would get good tollfrees, those
that spell something, or all 0' or ...  "cherry numbers" and would start
inflating the prices of them, just as domain names have been done, and
selling them off.  They do not want the numbers themselves to be a
commodity traded that way, basically company X needs to sell all their
tollfrees for the same price, and not charge a premium for '800' where
'888/77/66/55' are discounted, if they get 800-something that is salable
as the name they shouldnt do that as well.

To get around this 2 main methods have been done it seems.  There are
probably others, but ...  A combo package of the telephone number,
domain name that matches, and all that are sold.  In this way the phone
number is not sold at a premium, the extra money comes from the matching
domain name, and all that.  The other way is to form 2 companies, one
that only does the "cherry numbers" and all of them are highly priced.
This way is a bit more sketchy.  Come to think about it I havent seen
either of these two advertised in 3 or so years, so maybe there was a
crackdown against it.  It used to be regularly that I would see this.

Of course this does not stop a canadian company from doing the same
thing, after all the tollfree pool is the same between countries, more
or less, and the FCC can only make US based orders.  


> I was looking into this as our original toll-free number started getting 
> a lot of calls for a long distance phone card provider with a different 
> toll-free prefix.

HA what a place to do a "early media" advert for services.  Early media
means no answering supervision so no per minute charges (why american
idol vote lines operate that way).  You can then advertise better rates
or whatever and capture some customers.  Its their fault for calling the
"advert line" instead of the number they wanted :)


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast +44 28 9099 6461        US +1 516 687 5200
http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you!