NEW YORK-If Richard Levine has his way, everyone could revert to seven-digit local calling simplicity, even amid the expanding complexity of wired and wireless telecommunications.
Levine, a research alumnus of Bell Labs and Nortel Networks, is director of Beta Scientific Laboratory Inc., Richardson, Texas. He received a patent last month for a software-based method designed to solve the problem of telephone number exhaustion and the resulting proliferation of digits required for dialing. Levine’s System Beta would allow each person to have a single number for wireline voice, fax, computer modem, wireless phone and pager.
If installed throughout North America, System Beta would cost the telecommunications industry about $7 billion, while saving it $30 billion. These estimates are based on an analysis performed a year ago by Levine, Charles Richoz, a retired manager of network architecture planning and manager of switch standardization for GTE Corp., and Charles Wiebe, a former director of North American Advanced Intelligent Network service switching point development and competitive product analysis for Nortel Networks.
“You don’t have to do a flash cut of all of North America at one time. If it is not installed universally, calls would default to the main number where the system is not available,” Levine said.
A ubiquitous deployment of System Beta for the common good over the longer term seems unlikely, given today’s highly competitive business environment with strong pressure for short-term financial results, Levine said. However, Beta Scientific is in discussions with three major telecom operating companies, which have expressed interest because they envision System Beta as offering an advantage in gaining and retaining customers, he added.
All people making calls through the origination, long-distance transit or destination switches of a carrier that has deployed System Beta would benefit from the number simplification it confers, whether or not they are customers of the service provider using the software, he said.
In one possible scenario, a carrier that uses System Beta would wait until it gets a certain percentage of market share, then license the system to other providers as they inevitably run out of numbers. Levine said one carrier suggested another possibility: “If I got 60-70 percent of all the lines in major metropolitan areas, I could retire my unused numbers and eliminate the number exhaustion problem for everyone else.”
The telecommunications engineer and professor of electrical engineering who teaches at Southern Methodist University said he began working on the idea several years ago when the City of Dallas was going through an area-code split and overlay.
A split divides territory into more numerous but more compact areas, each assigned an individual code, but that means callers end up dialing 10-digit numbers, even to reach parties a short distance away. An overlay introduces an additional area code into a single geographical area, resulting in the annoying occurrence of different codes for old and new phone connections in the same building or on the same block.
System Beta became possible because of a Federal Communications Commission decision. It resulted in the appointment of Chicago-based NeuStar, formerly Lockheed Martin IMS, as manager and repository for a local number portability master database. LNP service, paid directly by telephone customers as an itemized monthly fee of 30 cents to 90 cents, stores location routing numbers in the database. System Beta assigns a so-called pseudo number, or binary code, to the LRN of each telecommunications connection.
Online by personal computer or by phone to a customer-service center, end-user customers would engage in a one-time activation of System Beta by assigning a pre-set sequence of several digits, similar to a star-number code, to each communications device they want attached to the single telephone number. This code would route incoming calls automatically to the appropriate device. If communications are going between wireless and wireline networks, callers also would need to dial each time a separate, predetermined star-number code.
In public documents, the FCC has estimated the total cost of the present system of area-code overlays and splits to be somewhere between $50 billion and $150 billion. Continuing this method may require four-digit area codes when three-digit ones ultimately are exhausted, but that is not expected to happen until 2019.
The other available alternative is number pooling via local number portability, porting unused telephone numbers in one area to a switch in another where there is a shortage of numbers. Unanswered questions regarding number porting include whether a sufficient supply of blocked or stranded numbers exists to be ported and thereby fill the overall demand.
In addition, ported numbers may cross rate-zone boundaries. This creates problems for callers, who cannot tell if the number they dialed is local. It also causes problems for telecommunications providers because their billing systems cannot always bill correctly for calls involving these ported numbers.
Levine said Beta Systems eliminates the problems caused by the other two solutions to telephone number exhaustion.
