Number Pooling

Telecommunications numbers are running out. In the last three years, the industry has added dozens of new area codes across the United States to deter the exhaustion. It used to be that you could easily associate a location with a phone number because of its familiar area code. If you had a message from a 408 or 415 area code, you knew it was a West Coast call. Now you have the new California area codes of 310, 510, 916 and 209, with the promise or threat of many more.

Although it seems we are running out of numbers, there still are plenty around. New service providers receive ranges of numbers, traditionally in 10,000-number bundles. However, they may not use them immediately, if ever. Consider the situation in which a rural community exchange has 10,000 numbers. Of those, the community has used only 5,000 numbers. Likewise, it appears there will be little or no need for use of the remaining numbers. Currently, these huge batches of numbers sit idle, gathering dust. And that situation is repeating itself in hundreds of rural, urban and wireless communities.

As one solution to number exhaustion, the industry has been toying with the concept of pooling these unused numbers. An organization would take the unused numbers from all of the operators across the country and pool them for any carrier with a need.

Normally, this pooling solution wouldn't be feasible, what with area codes designating locations in the United States. However, number portability allows customers to receive their phone service from competitive providers without being forced to change their telephone numbers when they switch. For example, if a customer chooses to move from Kansas City to New York, he theoretically could be able to keep the same number, even though it carries a 913 area code. So suddenly, the pooling concept has the potential to work. Consider if a 913 exchange has an excess of 5,000 numbers that it contributes to the pool, and an East Coast carrier has a need for more numbers. It wouldn't matter that those numbers were originally designated for Overland Park, KS.

With number portability in place, phone numbers that have been ported to other service providers are mapped to a virtual number, or location routing number, assigned to a new service provider.

Although originally designated to make customer transition among carriers more customer friendly, number portability also allows carriers to make use of large pools of numbers that have lain dormant for years. According to Cody Bowman, Ericsson director of network intelligence and strategic marketing, the use of pooled numbers would give the telecommunications industry another 10 to 15 years to evaluate what to do about the number exhaustion situation.

Bowman said he thinks that eventually the industry will exhaust all of the available numbers, thanks to the proliferation of wireless devices, fax machines and other non-traditional phone- number-driven devices. He said he is not sure what the next solution will be, but number pooling and number portability "give us a little time to find a solution to number exhaustion."

Recently, Microsoft's Bill Gates suggested that telephone numbers were an antiquated method of addressing telecom calls. He said he thought e-mail addresses would replace numbers. Ericsson's Bowman is not sure he agrees.

"I think e-mail may actually be the dinosaur eventually," Bowman said. "I think the next step may be more of a holistic approach, something more transparent to the customer."

Bowman said that because telecommunications functions are built on an embedded base of copper and fiber keyed on numbers, the telephone number is unlikely to be replaced. Even if e-mail addresses became the contact number/name of choice, Bowman said it would still have to map back to the numeric system that serves as the backbone today.

Recently, Ericsson demonstrated that it could download large blocks of numbers for carrier convenience. In fact, it showed that it could provide range updates of up to 1,000 location routing number records and 2,000 global title translation types in less than a second.

"Ericsson's range update capabilities are especially beneficial to service providers as they first implement (local number portability)," said Ron Dikhoff, Ericsson Network Systems executive vice president & general manager. "Setting up the first subscribers in a ported rate center is much easier with the ability to update thousands of numbers at one time. This is also an advantage as service providers implement number pooling to slow number exhaust."

If, for instance, a carrier picks up an additional few thousand numbers from the pool, it needs a way to download those numbers onto the service control point or signal transfer point in one big burst rather than individually. Carriers need to consider how they will administer large sets of numbers they have tapped from the pool. According to Cody Bowman, Ericsson director of network intelligence and strategic marketing, downloading in large 1,000-number bursts allows carriers to handle the database administration in a matter of minutes, rather than hours of individual number entry. Bowman said that Ericsson is the first vendor to demonstrate this capability, though he suggested that other vendors are working on it as well.

"It provides operators with huge maintenance support in loading and maintaining large number groups," he said.