US government reports estimate that the United States, Canada, Guam, Bermuda and Trinidad will run out of 10-digit numbers by the year 2025, driven by demand for cellphones, faxes and other devices. The coming crunch has led at least one industry organisation to draw up a plan for a 12-digit future that could add some 640 billion new numbers to the pool. In the meantime, the FCC composed two conservation measures, both opposed by the phone carriers. One, "number portability," would let people keep their phone numbers even if they switch carriers. The second would force carriers to be assigned a smaller amount of telephone numbers at a time. Against this backdrop, some carriers said they are concerned about what they see as unorthodox number allocation practices among VoIP providers. At the 22 January NANC meeting, proponents of VoIP phone number regulation said they want agencies including the FCC to examine the Internet-phone industry's use of "designer numbers," among other things. Because of the nature of the Web, computer phone providers can offer customers a choice of different area codes, regardless of where they live. "The idea is not to choke this thing off, but to explore the issues and reach some agreements so we can go forward," said Randy Sanders, Bellsouth's director of regulatory and external affairs. NANC members were interested enough in the problems to order a subcommittee to come up with some of the possible technical problems involved with telephone numbers and VoIP. Others, however, have dismissed the concerns as overblown for an industry that is barely getting its legs in North America. In a white paper called Much Ado About Nothing, AT&T recently argued that Internet phone providers aren't attracting enough customers for now to even pose a possible problem to be addressed. "The sky is not falling," AT&T wrote this week to the NANC. Worldwide, there were around 2.93 million cable telephony subscribers in 2001, more than the 2.5 million most analysts were predicting, according to a study last year by Allied Business Intelligence, an Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based research firm. That number was expected to almost double by the end of 2002, reaching 5.2 million subscribers, the study predicted. By contrast, only a handful of companies sell computer telephone service in the United States, with fewer than 100,000 people now using broadband connections to make phone calls. The leading computer phone provider is Vonage, which has about 10,000 customers. Currently, NANC and the North America Numbering Plan Administrator (NANPA) distribute phone numbers in blocks to so-called incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs), which then follow set rules in transferring some of those numbers to competitive local exchange carriers, or CLECs, that ride on their lines. Vonage representative Brooke Shultz said the company gets its telephone numbers from CLECs, although she declined to name the suppliers or the terms of the transfer deals. Shultz dismissed the lobbying effort as a competitive tactic. "This is really the first sort of tactic to get us regulated," said Shultz. "We're not misusing numbers." Industrywide makeover
Regardless of where the industry stands now, there is no doubt of the momentum behind a new way of delivering voice communications at a fraction of the cost of traditional phone networks. VoIP providers generally require two things -- a broadband connection and either an adapter for a landline phone or a microphone and speaker device for computers. The calls travel mostly over the Web, avoiding the toll roads that are traditional phone lines. As a result, computer phone services can offer plans with unlimited dialling and no long-distance charges. The average monthly price is $40. VoIP's efficiencies come through its use of packet-switching technology, which breaks up communications into small bits that are dispersed to find the fastest path across the network and recombined at the end point. Traditional telephony, by contrast, is "circuit-switched," creating a dedicated channel for the duration of the call. Analysts have cautioned that traditional phone companies could get squeezed out of VoIP technology. Responding to the threat, big carriers including Verizon and Qwest have been doing billion-dollar deals with equipment makers such as Nortel Networks to add packet-switching capabilities. Sprint began adding packet switching to its network in 2002 following a $1.1bn deal with Nortel. Qwest Communications International has also announced that it will adopt packet-switching technology. Norm Bogen, a communications infrastructure and services analyst with Cahners In-Stat, expects the sale of media gateways, the equipment needed to install VoIP systems, to increase from $883m in 2003 to $2.74bn in 2006. Even as the big carriers race to get into this area, however, Bogen tipped the advantage to the upstart VoIP providers. "They are replacing the local phone company," Bogen said.
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