The future of telecom

[unixronin]

Google's Voice service lets you have a single master number that is automatically forwarded to as many other numbers as you designate, within reason. It's a good idea. But the US is running out of phone numbers as it is, and there probably aren't enough allocatable phone numbers remaining to let everyone do this without revamping the entire US phone number system.

But what if we rethought the whole concept of phone numbers?

Historically, one number has been tied to one phone line. You may have multiple phones on that line, and you may have a phone that has multiple lines coming into it, and ISDN phones have the capability to have up to three "appearances" of the same number on the line. But still, one number is tied to one line — or, in the case of mobile phones, one number is tied to one mobile phone. This metaphor has been a good match for the way the technology has always worked. But the technology is changing — already has changed enormously — and we don't have to do that any more.

Suppose we decoupled phone numbers from devices, and tied them instead to people and to roles, replacing a 1:1 mapping between phones and numbers with a many-to-many mapping. You have, for example, a personal phone number, an office phone number, and an on-call phone number. Your home phone is subscribed to your personal number — except that on days when you work from home, you subscribe it for the day to your office number as well. Your mobile phone is subscribed to your personal number and your on-call number. The phone on your office desk at work is subscribed to your office number and your on-call number. Perhaps you have a team number as well, that everyone on your work team is subscribed to. Whenever any of your phones rings, the display tells you not only who's calling you, but which of your subscribed numbers they're calling — and which of their numbers they're calling you from. That incoming call on your office phone is from your Cisco rep, but he's calling you from his personal number, perhaps to let you know he's in the area and ask whether you want to meet for lunch.

Discuss....

Comments

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

The biggest financial complaint that I see the Bell companies (and their competition) making is that something like this effectively nukes the concept of "long distance".

Not that I'm against nuking long distance charges, but money talks, and I don't have that much.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"Long distance" is dying anyway. It's a little-known fact that before the enforced AT&T breakup, AT&T was planning to do away with long distance charges altogether, and one of the real reasons behind the forced breakup was that the other long-distance carriers screamed bloody murder because they knew they'd be out of business almost overnight.