A telephone numbering plan is a scheme used to distribute international telephone numbers between various continents and cities or among mobile phone providers. Still dial plans are not just the same thing as numbering plans. And the closed numbering plan, it is normal in areas like North America or Australia where local phone numbers are dialed together with appointed length region codes.
A number of countries of the world haven’t yet standardized the size of area dialing codes and local telephone numbers so in these places the open numbering plan is popular. The numbers formed by this plan are dialed differently. You must know which units should be always dialled (these digits form the local phone number) and which may be omitted (calling codes).
Even after the actions of the International Telecommunication Union or ITU to define the norms of numbering plans and international calling codes they still stay different in various places. At first the Union suggested the different countries to have double zero as the international access code. Still the offer was not binding for the state members so only some of them introduced the code, while the rest state members like United States and the members of the North American Numbering Plan stayed on their conditions. Missed the idea? Try our new reverse phone directory!
Area codes (the codes that define nations or set of countries) are established by the international numbering plan. In order to control the codes for international calls there is the E.164 standard. It points the common size of the complete number. Still in every country the numbers are set in a different way by local standards. So here are the kinds of regional area codes with:
- The extension officially set by nation standards as it is in the USA (three units) or in Australia and New Zealand (1 unit).
- Uncertain dialing code standards. So in regions like Argentina the code differs between 2 and five, in Japan – between one and five and in Syria or Peru the dialling code contains from one up to 2 digits.
- The norms of big numbers that simply contain the dialing code. They apply it for example in Spain or Norway. In this case the closed numbering plan is applied. Sometimes long-distance area calling codes are applied in regions like Italy, the Netherlands or Switzerland, african countries etc. And generally for this purpose zero is applied.
The dialing code of the region generally enables to charge the people for air time correctly. Generally calling on the numbers within the same area dialling code is really cheaper than calling on the phone numbers with some other dialling code.
But it is generally otherwise in States as there the prices for local calls are controlled by the state itself and the prices often happen to be bigger than for interurban connection.
As it happens that in United States the interval between the callers of one extensive location may be too big, the calls are charged considering the interval despite the area calling code is the same.
Rate centers commonly set the rates, which are set for zones from 0 to six miles, from 6 to 12, and bigger zones. However, it changed with the lack of control of home call services.
Now it’s going popular among the people to use the so-called all-you-can-eat plan (a fixed price of nearly 30 dollars per month as fixed for May 2008 letting call to any city of United States).
In a number of regions cell phone systems use particular area dialing codes. As well they are applied for some special rates, free or premium rates.
There also may be various particular occasions. For example in areas like Egypt calling code mean nothing because the costs remain similar for all the country and in the UK the dialing code is divided into 2 pieces each with its cost.
tags: Telecommunications author:
Buying a phone card from Germany? there are a number of incidents to consider when you order international calling cards:
- Calling cards Elapse.
A lot of call cards have an discontinuation date. In most cases all spare minutes are set free when the card stops working. (However, it is not always like that and on a few best phone cards lost minutes can be repossessed by renewing the calling card)
- Billing Advance.
Avoid the prepaid cards that have least times of more than 1 minute. You should consider cards that have a 60 second minimum and offer a tiny billing elevation. Best billing advance embark upon at 6 sec.
- Rounding off.
So if your regular increment is three minutes and you make a 4 minute call - you will be charged for six minutes.
- Be on your guard against the Surcharge.
Making short duration calls with this type of card can metamorphose into really expensive when using USA call card. It is better to use this variety of phone card to make ten or more minute calls particularly to Africa.
- Hunt down if there is a possible supply charge.
Phone cards turn up in three forms:
- Actual physical calling card
- Real palpable telephone card and an instant e-mail Pincode
- PIN only virtual (no plastic)
- Determine if there are money payments in the business.
Intermittently there is a financial cost – namely if you are buying a $15 phone card there is no good use in paying a $10 fee for the benefit of spending for call card by Visa card. Go round cheap calling cards if they charge you for buying it. Your money is better spent elsewhere.
tags: Phone Systems author:
Here is a small clip from tht mobile monday event in the Samsung Center that we streamed from our pda using quik. Ari spoke on an expert panel along with Robert Samuels of the New York Times and Carl Taylor of Hutchison Whampoa Europe. During the discussion, Ari explained how one can create a personal WiFi hotspot with one of the many cutting edge Cradlepoint routers. You can use these routers with a USB or PCMCI data card or throught a usb connection to your data phone or PDA. Furthermore, many of these routers will soon have Wimax or 4G capabilities. Check out the Cradlepoint Routers on http://www.quantum-wireless.com and http://www.Wimax.net
Technorati Tags: cradlepoint, mobile monday, New York Times, PDA, Robert Samuels, Samsung Center, WiFi Hotspot
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Additional services included are accessible to those who use prepaid telephone cards to make either local or international calls.
Sending messages is what’s actually general for most phone operators. Paying for their message packs in advance the callers get an opportunity to be sure of their expenditures and simply feel good carelessly talking on their phones. SMS service is included just like MMS. Sms feature helping people to talk with little messages is also known as “texting”. Speaking of MMS, it’s used to share mixed media messages like clips or graphic files and is a short for Multimedia Message Service. Just like in case with long distance connection it’s available to economize money managing the expenses beforehand.
One can as well see some different good services available to the buyers of international calling card. Many mobile users these days happen to care for getting music files with their telephones. Would y Read more…
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We noted that Apple had recently started banning any kind of competitive app from the iPhone App Store, saying that various iPhone developers must be eagerly awaiting the launch of Google-powered Android phones. And, indeed, that seems to be the case for the developer of the Podcaster app, who has announced that he’ll now develop the app for Android phones instead. The final straw, apparently, was Apple closing the workaround he was using to get the Podcasting app to users — and doing so with no communication or explanation whatsoever. Apple may believe it can get away with treating developers this way when there’s no serious competition in the marketplace, but they may discover that pissing off your developer community has pretty long-term negative consequences when that competition actually arrives.
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Tonight, our family watched Sony’s Daddy Day Camp, a mediocre film, but with enough funny moments to make it worthwhile. I’d give it a 5 out of 10. Anyhow, when the end credits rolled up, out jumped the fantastic Jackson Five classic of all time ‘I Want You Back‘ which my kids had never heard. They were shocked to find out that it was Michael Jackson singing, so we popped straight over to YouTube to check out the video and the young pre-surgery MJ. The song is now part of out iTunes collection.
They liked the young MJ’s moves, which led me to talk about his award winning performance of Billie Jean that led Fred Astaire to declare him as the greatest dancer of our time. So we just had to see it and the legendary moon walk, which in this performance is part of a massive extended routine to a solo drum+bass at the end, including a brilliant sidewards moonwalk - definitely moonwalk 2.0!
Of course, they wanted to know who Fred Astaire was, so I searched out his Putting on The Ritz routine in which you can see some moves that are directly imported into Jackson’s repertoire, such as the high-leg ‘running on the spot’ in time with the beat, used a lot in the Billie Jean performances.
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The Philadelphia saga is about to get a whole lot more interesting. Though I’ve been privy to a lot of the behind-the-scene negotiations, if you’re looking for details, you’ll have to look elsewhere. However, you won’t have to wait long — the Philadelphia Metro has already started covering things — which means that someone’s already spilling the beans. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News are going to be running stories tomorrow.
All in all, the proposed solution is a really good one for the residents of Philly; but yes, it’s caught up on the demand for a $250,000 payment. Meanwhile, Wireless Philadelphia released this statement today…
Dear Friend of Wireless Philadelphia:
I am writing to provide you a brief update on the Wireless
Philadelphia Initiative.
Philadelphia’s Wi-Fi network continues to operate in the roughly 80% of the City in which it has been deployed (see map
). Nothing in the ten-year Network Agreement
permits EarthLink to unilaterally impose deadlines for the network’s transfer, turn off the network or remove network equipment.
It has been well publicized that EarthLink recently announced its intention to sell its Wi-Fi networks and exit the municipal wireless business. Wireless Philadelphia and the City of Philadelphia continue to work together to explore options for the network’s future. In the meantime, we are committed to our core mission of serving Digital Inclusion customers with internet access, hardware, technical support and training.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.
Best regards,
Greg Goldman
CEO
Wireless Philadelphia
ggoldman@wirelessphiladelphia.org
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Speaking at a New America Foundation event yesterday in Washington, D.C., Google co-founder Larry Page tried to bolster his firm’s case for the FCC to make white spaces–vacant channels of Read more…
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Why can’t I get in contact with people by telephone sometimes (often)? It’s simple. My telephone only offers me a 50/50 chance, or less, of making contact. If I dial your number, I have no idea if you’re available or not.
Why do we still have this problem? After all, we live in an age of mass computing. Moreover, there’s more computing power in my phone than yesterday’s laptop. And, isn’t it a problem that everyone has? Telephone tag. You’d think that we’d have solved this by now, wouldn’t you?
It’s possibly to do with frames of thinking. In telephony, we talk about circuits and circuit-switched calls, which is how most mobile calls still work. Therefore, to complete a call, you ‘need’ to complete a circuit. In fact, in the old days you’d need an operator to do this and they’re still pretending that they’re there, which is why roaming calls are artificially expensive.
Are we really interested in a completing-a-circuit experience? No. Only communications engineers care about such things. We’re mostly interested in having a communication experience. A conversation, no less. An exchange of ideas, requests, views and so on.
If we were designing a complete-the-conversation experience, we might think differently. We would think about all the ways that two (or more) people could connect and exchange whatever they need to exchange that day in a timely fashion.
The issue is primarily one of scheduling and availability. For two people to attempt a connection and have a high probability of success, then they need to agree when it’s going to take place. We all know this, yet why isn’t it a feature of our phones? Isn’t this an essential and integral part of making a call? Not in the telecoms mindset, no. Any state diagram showing a call being made begins with placing the call, it never begins with scheduling the call. This, it seems, isn’t important. It’s somebody else’s problem.
There are lots, possibly hundreds, of oversights like this when we critically analyse telephony services with a view to how well they support real human interactivity rather than meeting functional technological goals, such as completing a circuit.
This relates to my previous post about ecosystems and user experience. Thinking in terms of two people making contact is all about the user experience. Thinking in terms of closing circuits isn’t. Creating a solution that meets the experiential needs of the user in a holistic fashion is mostly about creating an ecosystem, not a point solution. For example, we would need a calendaring system to support call scheduling. It is remarkable that we still don’t have shared and group calendaring on our mobiles, especially considering that we all have them and we all have diaries, whether computerised, on paper or in our heads! (In fact, it probably doesn’t pay to think in terms of diaries, but that’s another story.)
We could brainstorm how best to facilitate scheduling and you might be surprised by the range of solutions. Why don’t you have a go.
What’s going on here? There is no simple answer, but a lot of it has to do with framing - how we think about things. This doesn’t just apply to technology. Almost everything we do has a historical basis. This becomes forgotten and we carry on with the solution without question. You might call it design-by-tradition.
This isn’t always the case. Sometimes we think that we understand the problem and we come up with a solution that fits with our preferred understanding. Later on, or even from the outset, that understanding might prove to be inappropriate, yet we stick with it because we ‘believe’ in it, perhaps for good reason. You might call it design-by-dogma.
It seems to me that IP Telephony is design-by-tradition. Apart from the cost savings, it is an almost useless facsimile of the whole circuit-switched experience. There is a vague attempt to solve the scheduling problem, using presence or chat, but this just pushes the problem into an out-of-band channel. These are not scheduling tools. They are not part of a holistic solution to having a remote conversation. They are just other traditional tools bundled in with the package.
On the iPhone, most people I talk with agree that it is a great device. Most of us who have one tend to admire it. I love mine. Overall, the experience is impressive. However, the texting part is incredibly poor, surprisingly so. In fact, it is so bad that I am left wondering what on earth they were thinking. For example, why leave out the ability to forward a message? This is like ‘messaging 101′ or ‘designing a messaging system for dummies’ kind of stuff.
It would seem that this is design-by-dogma. The iPhone’s texting interface is an attempt to copy the iChat interface - they are identical visually. Yet, they are NOT the same. Texting is asynchronous (’fire and forget’) and not exclusively a chatting tool. Anyone who’s read a basic book about texting habits knows that forwarding texts is a huge amount of texting traffic. Yet, this doesn’t fit with the iChat frame of thinking.
And then, only this week, I discover yet another problem with texting on the iPhone - it isn’t ‘fire and forget.’ Without coverage, it simply tells the user ‘error sending message,’ or some unhelpful equivalent. It doesn’t pop the message into an ‘outgoing’ box and attempt to send it later when coverage resumes.
Again, this is design-by-dogma. If you’re having a real-time chat, then you probably don’t want your message stuck in an outbox and sent some arbitrary time later - it wouldn’t mesh with the chat experience.
Where’s cut-and-paste on the iPhone? More dogma. It doesn’t quite fit with the multi-touch paradigm, so they simply leave it out, against all sense I would say. It’s like designing a car that does 100 mpg and then leaving out seats because they didn’t fit with the design goal, which was 100 mpg, not ‘getting me comfortably and safely from A to B within 100 mpg.’
Apple seem to be the masters of thinking about user experience, but this shows that even they can get it wrong, such is the power of sticking to a particular frame of thought.
tags: Uncategorized author:
AT&T (NYSE: T) Phone Company is once again challenging the imminent merger of Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S) with Clearwire (NYSE: CLWR), whose aim is to merge both companies’ WiMax assets in order to create a nationwide broadband wireless network.
This merger would be huge for Wimax, estimating a deal worth 14. 5 billion dollars, and is promising to be a huge success. Just ask Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA), Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), all companies who are currently backing this magnanimous merger.
This union would be a grave threat to AT&T’s future success and longevity as a company, and therefore they are claiming that Sprint and Clearwire are “failing to make the required showings necessary for the commission’s review.” They are hoping that this new claim against Wimax would prohibit the FCC from approving its launch.
AT&T clearly understands the importance of mass mergers, seeing as how the company exists today solely because of a mergence between their company and Bellsouth. This alliance has allowed AT&T to grow and reach profound heights in profit margins and overall global accessibility. The same could all too easily occur as a result of the coalition between Sprint and Clearwire, an outcome that obviously leaves AT&T worried.
And AT&T has more than one reason to be nervous about the Wimax wireless network. AT&T is currently working on their own 3G wireless technology, but it is still light years away from the technology currently being deployed by the Sprint and Clearwire union.
With advanced technologies and unparalleled support from large corporations such as Intel and Google, it is no surprise why AT&T is scared about its ineludible launch.
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