A three-judge panel upheld the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites)’s long-delayed rule forcing wireless (news - web sites) telephone companies to let cell-phone customers keep their phone numbers when they switch carriers

It’s a real hassle to switch carriers, you got to transfer your address book from one SIM to the other (more if you got calendar stuff in your mobile), sending email/SMS to inform all your contacts the changing of mobile number. As a consumer, it’d be good if mobile number could be always stay the same. The number would be like an identity then, but you always got the choice to have a new one, as long as you paid.

It isn’t a good news to telco though. Take Malaysia telco as example, certain numbering are allocated to different mobile service providers. The current players on the market are DIGI, MAXIS/Timecel (note: MAXIS just bought over TimeCel a few months ago), Celcom/TMTouch. Some countries assigning all their mobile number under one particular area code (e.g. all mobile number in Singapore started with ‘9’). Instead, we have different “area code” for assigned to telcos: MAXIS/TimeCel(012, 017), Celcom/TMTouch(019, 013, 010), DIGI (016). And pre-set numbering has been allocated for these telcos. For example:

• MAXIS number: 012-3215xxx
• DIGI number: 016-2703xxx
• TimeCel number: 017-8889xxx

Since these numbers are pre-allocated (in charge of MCMC ), if it’s going to implement “mobile number following customers”, there are a lot of jobs aheading these telcos for implementing this feature. Most of the system on supporting mobile operation has been adopting the identification of own mobile number or other operators’ number by checking on the prefix 3 or 4 digits. If it got to be consolidated, billing system need a big change, CDR processing got an impact, commission system, CRM, ICS…etc, it got to be a huge headache.

Is U.S. telecom industry applying the same rules? It’s lucky M’sia telco don’t have to worry about it yet.