London Banter - View Single Post - Dual SIM phones was:Worker killed by Southern train was covering for brother

Someone Somewhere · July 18th 19, 09:13 AM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london

On 18/07/2019 09:19, wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 07:02:07 +0100
Someone Somewhere wrote:
On 17/07/2019 20:44, wrote:

Ones where the credit rolls over and you don't have to make a regular
calls to keep them alive, aren't quite as common as you claim. The
networks hate them because they tend to get used in "glovebox" phones
were they have all the costs of maintaining the number and the billing
records, for virtually no revenue.

Oh come on, its costs them precisely Ã‚Â£0.00 to maintain a number, its
simply
data in a database.

And you are qualified to say that how? Who supplies the database, and

I've work in IT and I've worked for a telecoms company in the past.

Clearly not in core networks. That's obvious.

on what license terms (hint: it's often on a per slot basis) - and

What license? If its a virtual network then yes, there may be a cost to
maintain a number though I doubt it because they're assigned in blocks anyway.
But otherwise no.

So who does O2 etc buy their core network equipment from? How do they
charge the operator for their software, hardware and services?

that's before we get to the overall costs where there may not be a net
gain per subscriber, but they have to be paid anyway - the radio
network, the data centres, the backhaul, the support staff, customer
services, Ofcom, etc etc etc.

And how is that affected in the slightest by having unused numbers in a
database? By definition if its unused there will be zero support staff and
customer service costs. Perhaps you're not aware that there are no fixed
circuits with cellphone systems, a phone number is just a number, nothing more
and its not as if numbers are scarce.

Oh dear. Firstly I am well aware of how mobile networks work, but to
answer your specific points numbers *are* scarce - look at the Ofcom
number list - there are very few unallocated ranges. Operators have
been profligate with number usage in the past and frankly we are running
out.

Off the top of my head, it's also not just a number, there will be
entries in the billing system, AuC/AAA, HLR/HSS, CRM, voicemail, VoLTE
TS, etc. Many of those vendors will be charging the operator on a per
subscriber basis. Those systems also have a finite capacity per
instance, so at some point an additional subscriber will cause the need
for a large capital expenditure for a new instance, plus the data
centre, power, cooling etc to host it.