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Number Portability A Rare VoIP Benefit |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Friday, 25 August 2006 |
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Page 1 of 3
With the Federal Government putting VoIP number portability
requirements on the back burner for now, the industry has done little to implement
a service that many potential business and consumer VoIP users would see as a
pre-requisite to making the switch from traditional phone services.
While the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media
Authority) says it feels there is no need to legislate to force service
providers to offer number portability in the IP Telephony space, it certainly
works to the incumbent's advantage in the interim.
Both small to medium business users and consumers alike
there is significant investment in established phone numbers. For business
especially apart from the need to re-print letterhead, business cards and the
like, most have a significant historical investment in marketing, advertising
and promotion and losing a well-established incoming phone number would risk losing
existing and potential customers.
Just as it did for the mobile phone industry, comprehensive
number portability between PSTN and VoIP services could spark a significant
groundswell of small business and home users who are presently unwilling to risk
that investment in existing phone numbers.
There are still significant regulatory holes concerning VoIP
telephony. It is not entirely clear whether VoIP services are classified as a
Standard Telephone Service as the legislation was written up without regard to
next generation services. This means items like number portability, emergency
calling provisions, operator assistance and certain aspects of customer billing
are not addressed by the legislation.
While a regulatory holiday may lower the barriers to entry
for this nascent sector of the telecommunications industry, it is something
that will have to be addressed in the long term and it is something service
providers may want to implement as a competitive advantage.
Telstra has suggested that any review of the legislation
should be carried out in a few years, once the market has stabilised. Part of
the problem in enacting new legislation is going to be achieving some sort of
consensus in how VoIP numbering and portability should be achieved. Larger
carriers will favour an entirely new numbering system for VoIP services, in the
same way that mobile phone services are numbered differently to fixed line
numbers.
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