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

Roland Perry · July 19th 19, 05:54 AM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london

In message , at 15:43:43 on Thu, 18 Jul
2019, remarked:
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 £0.00 to maintain a number, its simply
data in a database.

Ah, the marginal costs fallacy rears its ugly head.

The only cost involved in an unused number is the cost to the user when the
phone company disconnects the SIM. The rest of it costs nothing because the
infrastructure would be needed regardless and linking a phone number to a
SIM id is probably a few hundred bytes or less in a DB. You could store the
entire UK phone book and every cellphone IMEI number on a USB stick with room to
spare never mind a fully fledged datacentre.

Let me know when you need a new spade, if that one wears out.

That's even assuming there's facilities which aren't charged to the
operator on a per-number basis.

O2 are not a virtual network.

O2 *are* an operator, they own the base station equipment.

Sure about that? It's not uncommon for it to be outsourced to people
like Ericsson.

They may well have, but any charges relating to the physical layer RF systems
will have nothing to do with how many subscribers the network has in its DB
unless they have so many they need to upgrade.

Ditto. Or are you an expert in the fees charged for outsourcing, now?
--
Roland Perry