Tuesday, 11 November 2003
number portability and telephone books
Maybe I’m anachronistic, but I like having a telephone directory. A printed one. I look things up in it a lot (white pages as well as yellow pages). One of my great frustrations with cellular numbers is that they aren’t in a directory—printed or online.
With the upcoming number portability, I suspect more people will begin moving from land lines to cellular-only, which leads me to wonder what’s going to happen to directories, directory assistance, and the like. If I move my land-line phone number to a cellular provider, will it still be in the phone book? If I give up my land-line entirely, will people be able to find my number at all if I don’t give it to them? Will phone books become anachronistic? Will I have to pay for each directory lookup because I’ll have to go through a third-party provider for the information?
