It's time for a better Number Resource Management System within your company.
Number portability enables customers to keep the same telephone number when changing service providers. The Commission has required wireline carriers to implement local number portability (LNP) since it issued Local Competition, Telecom Decision CRTC 97-8, 1 May 1997 (Decision 97-8). In Telecom Order CRTC 99-5, 8 January 1999 (Order 99-5), the Commission, based on the record of a proceeding initiated in a letter to the industry of 17 July 1997, concluded that access to LNP systems to port numbers should be restricted to local exchange carriers (LECs). Its purpose was to enable competition in the marketplace and the rise of the CLECs. A Number Portability Administration Centre (NPAC) was implemented in Canada to facilitate porting.
Number portability has come a long way in the 25 years since then. For example, Telecom Decision CRTC 2005-72, 20 December 2005 (Decision 2005-72), the Commission required wireless carriers to port in and port out telephone numbers and granted them direct access to existing Canadian number portability systems, without having to meet the competitive local exchange carrier obligations. Wireless resellers were not granted direct access to number portability systems, but wireless carriers, as a condition of providing telecommunications services to wireless resellers, were required to incorporate in all existing and future contracts and other arrangements with wireless resellers, the requirement that wireless resellers support the porting-in and out of telephone numbers. Inter-modal porting between fixed-line and wireline services was also mandated which has helped facilitate the decline in home phone usage, as customers cut the cord and move to wireless services.
Service providers also began to use porting for network grooming/load balancing/routing unrelated to consumers by sending traffic to different LRNs for different switches.
Then came wholesalers who provide network points of interconnections (POIs) to other service providers, and virtual network providers began buying telephone numbers they could assign for use with cloud-based VoIP services.
With all this change, carrier number resource management systems must continue to evolve. Looking forward, we may see the following:
Changes to number resource assignments to support 1,000 block number assignments.
Changes to support VOIP traffic routing among carriers (e.g., different POI types, and POI consolidation covering areas larger than an exchange or Local Interconnect Region).
Wireless 5G network device identifiers (coming soon).
PKI certificate management for secure interconnection between service providers.
Are you as a carrier ready for the above noted future changes? Are your number management systems able to present a complete picture of assigned and available number resources information with appropriate groupings (e.g., exchange, market, product/service, OCN, or POI) to manage utilization? Or do you think you can still get by with spreadsheets?
Can you immediately determine if a number is in service on your switch for the purposes of STIR/SHAKEN?
Can you use your system to quickly prepare an industry-wide routing change request?
Are you ready for changes to industry reporting practices related to annual resource utilization forecasting and requests for additional number resources in a thousand block pooling environment?
COMsolve together with its partner 10X People has extensive experience with number resource management systems and may be able to provide you with solutions.