What keeps people from shopping around between cell phone companies, seeking out the best deals, the best service, the best of whatever it is they are looking for? What restrains true competition in the field?
Lack of number portability.
See, when you change from one cell phone carrier to another, you don’t get to keep your number. It gets reassigned (eventually), and you have to go to all the bother of letting folks know about the new number, have business cards reprinted, and other such annoyances, remind folks about it again because they still have the old number in their own electronic phone books, etc.
In 1996, the Federal Government, noting that this whole thing was basically a rip-off and not technologically driven, mandated that by sometime in 1999, cell phone service providers would have to allow number portability.
They didn’t. They pissed and moaned and complained and got delays and postponements in the deadline, which is presently sitting at 26 November 2002 — not coincidentally just a few days before Thanksgiving. They’ve continued to sigh and sob and claim it will be too expensive to change their switching software and too difficult and too expensive and even if local phone companies have had to do the same thing, and even if surveys show that a substantial number of cell phone users would switch plans if number portability were available, consumers really, truly, at heart, aren’t interested in number portability. Honest Injun.
And now, quel surprise, the largest mobile carriers are trying to quietly kill the whole thing.
The FCC is expected to rule on the matter in a few weeks. Given the Bush Administration’s pandering to business, I’m not hopeful about this one.
(Via Boing Boing)