11.26.2003
With number portability in effect as of yesterday, stories are everywhere today about the upsurge in activity at stores and customer service lines for all six major wireless carriers, presumably as people finally feel free to switch their phone service without the hassle of changing their number. The New York Times quotes one customer as saying, “I’ve been waiting six months to do this,” still remembering a particularly bad experience he’d had with his provider. But if traffic was up everywhere, does this mean everyone was equally unhappy? When the numbers are finally reported, they’ll probably be in terms of net losses, and carriers won’t look so bad, as they’ll all be gaining new customers to offset the ones jumping ship. But the million dollar question is going to be, who had the most of their original customers leave? And how are they going to convince the new ones to stay?
But thinking of portability made me think about some of the phone numbers I left behind over the last six or seven years, ones I could have kept if a rule like this had existed in the earlier wireless days, and one in particular: a Manhattan wireless number I used as a work phone for a time. It’s vaguely interesting that I even had one, since I’ve never actually lived or worked in Manhattan. I got the phone from a wireless carrier client of ours back around ‘97, through their employee discount program, and since they didn’t yet have a network in D.C. at the time, they said I could pick a number from any area code where they had service, which was most of the Northeast. After not too much consideration, we picked a Manhattan number. For all of our New York-area clients, it would be a local or regional call, cheaper than calling a mobile phone with a 202 area code, and whenever we were up in the city on business, we’d save money calling around, too. It seems pretty quaint already, the idea that a local area code could save you and your callers money, now that everyone I know has a nationwide calling plan with tons of minutes. But that brings me to the second reason we picked Manhattan: cachet. I could have chosen a Mountain Lakes, NJ, number (201), or a Long Island 516, or even a Brooklyn 718 (these days, so trendy, but in 97, maybe a little too cutting edge for our clients), and we’d have received the same call savings. But if someone offers you a Manhattan number, you take it. It was a lot cheaper than opening a Manhattan office, but the effect was almost the same, when giving someone the number — I was an insider, with a NYC presence, even if it was only the virtual one of a cell phone number, and even if it was a 917 number, and not 212 (yeah, that actually mattered back then, too).
Which is the essence of the FCC’s decision on number portability, that your number is something you should own, the address to a little piece of real estate in the telecom world that invisibly permeates and saturates our own, and as a result, there’s an additional angle to number portability’s emotional appeal I haven’t seen covered too much in the news stories yet. Because unlike, say, a Manhattan apartment’s address, and more like an email account — the college address you can log into for years; the old well.org account; the vanity address you forward to your real one — you can carry your mobile number with you when you’ve moved way out to the ‘burbs, and maintain a little street cred, or moved to another state altogether, where you can hold on to a little piece of home every time you give your number out. We all know people who have done this: moved cross-country for a job and kept their old cell phone numbers for as long as they could, or as a matter of course until their contracts ran out. When they finally bought new phones, and had to switch to the new area code, it became one of those milestones, like giving up your old state’s driver’s license, that said, well, it’s official, I’ve moved — I’m not a New Yorker or a Californian or a Nebraskan anymore. But because of this, I’ve heard stories of people who’ve held on to their phones for years, even if the service or rates or phones themselves were terrible, because they couldn’t give up that phone number, and what they felt it said about them. Maybe they were holding on to the hope that it was only temporary, and they’d be back home soon; maybe it was a way to say, every time they gave out their numbers, I’m not one of you, I’m /really/ from there, even if I’ve lived and worked five, seven, ten years in this godforsaken place.
Whatever will be motivating them, there are going to be a lot more of these people now that portability is in effect. Call them what you want (NYTimes’ Sunday Style can probably hunt out a dumb term in the next few months, say, “codesquatters,” “metroposeurs,” “geoshifters”): for these folks, their phone number’s going to say less about where they live, and more about where they wish they lived, or live in their hearts. Despite the FCC’s guideline that WLNP “does not allow consumers to keep the same phone number when moving to a new town or city,” it’s not hard to imagine several simple contrivances to keep wireless carriers in the dark to one’s new location, especially when you can get billed by email or direct deposit - I already know people who do this with their satellite TV providers so they can get the local TV channels, and sports broadcasts, they want in another city (believe it or not, it works). And at a time when calling one area code costs the same as another, what’s local really even mean? Take it to the next logical step, and the carriers might as well let us choose our own area codes when we sign up. Charge $5 if someone wants a code that doesn’t match his or her street address - a vanity area code - and it’s a brand new source of revenue for the carriers. Maybe that could help make up for the cost of all the people lined up out the door right now to make the switch, hoping the grass is a little greener on the other side.
more shey.net
11.24.2003: no. 29
I don’t know about you, but those are starting to look like a lot of candles… thanks, though, everybody, and always and especially Rachel.
12.02.2003: linkage catchup
Some recent links worth checking out (all from Tom Coates, Matt Haughey, or random emails from friends): Slashdot’s early (mis)take…