Toll Free and Local Number Porting 101 (A Primer for VoIP Providers)

VoIP Providers is coming of age and that’s saying a lot from someone who has been in telecom for twenty-five years.  Until very recently many of the traditional landline people, and a lot of the public, were not sure if voice over Internet quality and reliability would ever be able to produce a service that could replace a customer’s landlines, but in just the last couple of years it is happening.

So now it is VoIP Providers turn to struggle with new challenges.  It’s only fair because we all had to learn their services to keep up.  I am finding increasing numbers of VoIP Providers entering the business thinking you could escape without dealing with old legacy products and processes, but if you are successful convincing your customers to give up their landlines, then you need to be able to offer all the services the customer has now.  That means you need to be able to take over their toll free services and port local numbers.  It’s understandable you might not have the back-office systems or knowledge in these areas because you have been busy building IP networks, but, with all successes, there are a few challenges.

There was a time when it was thought that cheap or free long distance with cell phones or IP would result in toll free disappearing, but that’s not happening for a couple of reasons.  One is that the public expects toll free numbers when dealing with certain industries.  You can’t quite convince us to use 713-555-4555 to call a major airline.  Besides many of these toll free numbers are planted so firmly in our brains that we are unwilling to learn anything else just because it would be cheaper for the business.  What about 1-800-FLOWERS, 1-800-COMCAST, or 1-800-I-FLY-SWA.

The second reason is new services have been launched that use toll free numbers in new ways.  Follow me services often use individual toll free numbers and marketing services use thousands of numbers to trace calls back to the source of the advertisement.  Toll free is still so heavily used that there are new companies cropping up to handle your toll free call when you accidentally dial the wrong – but close to the right number.

For VoIP Providers the problem is that toll free calls can come from anyone, anywhere and you can’t pick up the call because you don’t have a distributed Carrier Identification Code (CIC) code.  Here’s how a toll free call works at the originating end.  When the toll free number is dialed the calls goes to the closest local phone central office.  Then the call is suspended by the SS7 network while a look-up, “data dip”, is performed at a local Service Control Point (SCP). How the call is going to be routed has already been built in the national database, downloaded to the SCP, and is waiting for the next dip to provide the information.  The SCP provides just a few pieces of information most importantly what CIC code should the toll free traffic be aimed at.  Only a few carriers have CIC codes loaded in all the local switches throughout the country, so everyone else is put on these few networks.  Getting a CIC code and distributing it on a large scale is very expensive and I haven’t actually seen anyone do that for many years.

So now your customer has changed to your service, given up their landlines and they want you (after all you are their carrier) to take over their toll free.  You aren’t going to be the carrier on the originating end because you don’t have a CIC code.  You need to port their toll free number, but you aren’t a RespOrg and may not even know what that is.  What do you do now?

VoIP Providers have two choices and the decision is driven by volume.  If your toll free traffic is still very small, you might want to just contract with someone to resell  their service.  That company will send you the billing information and you put it on your bill at some mark-up.  The other option is to contract with a carrier to gather up your toll free traffic and deliver it to you at a specific switch or switches so you can then put the traffic on your own network and into your own billing system.  I guess a third option is to tell your customer your don’t offer toll free service and they need t o get a landline installed, but that would probably make a customer that just got rid of their landlines pretty unhappy.

CAUTION!  Before you port your first toll free number you need to consider your RespOrg decision.  Although I may be biased, my advice is you should never have your carrier be the RespOrg for your toll free numbers.  It’s not that carriers are bad guys; it’s just that you always want to maintain control over the routing of your calls in the national database.  This means you either want to be your own RespOrg which I wouldn’t advise, especially if you are reading this because you don’t have a background in landline toll free, or use an independent.   In the interest of not turning this into an advertisement, I won’t address that here.

If you have the traffic delivered to your switch you will need to attach the terminating, or ring to, or DID (the industry often uses these terms synonymously) to the call because unlike local numbers there is no routing information in a toll free number.  Of course now with local portability that is becoming true with local numbers too, but more about that later.  At this point you now have to get the call back on the local telephone network, at least sometimes, to get it to your customer.

Also, the process of acquiring toll free numbers (porting) from other companies can be tricky, and often requires an enormous amount of follow-up. Unlike local number porting, there is no automatic system in place if the current carrier does not respond to a porting request within a given time. The number will just sit there until the carrier is “motivated” to release it. A good RespOrg provides motivation in the form of phone calls, emails, escalation managers, and other tricks of the trade. It’s what my company refers to as LADWAB, “Like A Dog With A Bone”.  After all else fails you can take the number, but it costs money and increases your liability.

This brings me to local number porting.  You would think after a decade of toll free porting local porting would have some similarity.  So far the only similarities I see is that both call it porting and both call the underlying system SMS.  They also both rely on a routing determinant; in toll free it is the terminating number and in LNP it is the LRN, a number that identifies the call geographically. But even that routing number is very different.  In toll free that number is determined by the end user and in LNP it is determined by the local carrier switch.  Toll free is highly  manual, still relying on fax, while local porting for the big carriers is highly mechanized, except for those providers that aren’t.  Toll free requires an actual signed LOA (Letter of Authorization) to be provided, LNP doesn’t. 

Local number porting requires a complete understanding of legacy (Bell) processes.  The Customer Service Requests (CSRs) and Local Service Requests (LSRs) in the cases of the large ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Companies) are formatted in the OBF (Ordering and Billing) format.  OBF has been operating since the break-up of the Bell System and, although it has provided a way for multiple companies to agree on industry wide formatting, it still is heavily controlled by what the Bell System developed in the 80s.  That means that the format is not user friendly and is written in a foreign language of acronyms.  If that isn’t bad enough, the OBF format is a skeleton example.  Each company chooses to use it somewhat differently and the companies aren’t required to follow it.  In Maryland alone there are two different Verizon formats.

So the bottom line is there are new things to learn and new hurdles to jump, but it is the price to fully serve the customer.  As has been true since the beginning of telecom, the more lines a single customer has the more profitable the account.  So make sure you can handle it all.

Aelea Christofferson

President, ATL Communications

Speaker at 2009 ITEXPO in Miami, January 20-22.