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

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 £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.

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.

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.

On 18/07/2019 07:02, 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 £0.00 to maintain a number, its
simply
data in a database.



And you are qualified to say that how?Â* Who supplies the database, and
on what license terms (hint: it's often on a per slot basis) - and
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.

Ok, answer me this -if the networks hate PAYG so much, why does it still
exist..?

--
Ria in Aberdeen

[Send address is invalid, use sipsoup at gmail dot com to reply direct]

In message , at 19:44:43 on Wed, 17 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.

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

Then there's a few phones which need a "5v" SIM, and don't work with a
3v one. Those SIMs are getting harder to find (some say that it's only
Pound-shop Orange SIMs these days, although I have a very old T-Mobile
SIM which is compliant).

Never realised there were 2 types of chips.

Apparently here are three.

Presumably the 5V are the early types of SIM?

Yes, the original ones. And it seems there are few people still making
very cheap phones with [old] chipsets that are also only 5v compatible.
--
Roland Perry

On Thu, 18 Jul 2019 13:25:01 +0100
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 19:44:43 on Wed, 17 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.

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.

wrote in message ...
On Sun, 14 Jul 2019 07:42:38 +0100
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 12:29:56 on Sun, 14 Jul
2019, Clank remarked:
Roland Perry Wrote in message:
That's where the albeit fairly rare dual-SIM phone has a role.

Only, for some reason, rare in the UK.

The reason is obvious: so many phones are either SIM-locked to one
provider, or are fitted with SIMs on non-rollover tariffs, that the
opportunities for fitting a second true-Pay-as-you-go SIM are quite
limited.

Of course back when 2G phones first came out the SIM was on a card you
could
switch cards easily in seconds but presumably that was deemed too
convenient
for users

it mitigated against the demand for ever smaller phones, but I'm sure you
knew that really.

Engineers didn't like creating designs for these ever smaller SIMs. It was
a real PITA. But it was what Marketing wanted

whereupon inserting the SIM was changed to require removing the
battery

IIRC for the the phone that I had that took a full credit card size SIM you
still had to fit it in under the battery

tim

"tim..." Wrote in message:
Engineers didn't like creating designs for these ever smaller SIMs. It was a real PITA.
But it was what Marketing wanted

Nonsense! We wanted to create smaller, better, cooler handsets
just as much as "marketing" - and the ridiculous credit-card
sized SIM was a major barrier to that.

whereupon inserting the SIM was changed to require removing the
IIRC for the the phone that I had that took a full credit card size SIM you still had to fit it in under the battery

Indeed, and this was always a feature rather than a bug - it meant
we could confidently design the software stack to assume the SIM
it booted up with would never change (for as long as it was
running.) This mattered when you were coding for a 68k
derivative with memory measured in peanuts, and every byte
counted...

--

"Clank" wrote in message
...
"tim..." Wrote in message:
Engineers didn't like creating designs for these ever smaller SIMs. It
was a real PITA.
But it was what Marketing wanted

Nonsense! We wanted to create smaller, better, cooler handsets
just as much as "marketing" - and the ridiculous credit-card
sized SIM was a major barrier to that.

well yes

but I was referring to the move from standard to micro to nano SIMs

whereupon inserting the SIM was changed to require removing the
IIRC for the the phone that I had that took a full credit card size SIM
you still had to fit it in under the battery

Indeed, and this was always a feature rather than a bug - it meant
we could confidently design the software stack to assume the SIM
it booted up with would never change (for as long as it was
running.) This mattered when you were coding for a 68k
derivative with memory measured in peanuts, and every byte
counted...

I don't recall working on "terminals" where memory was measured in peanuts

we had enough of it.

The problem was it wasn't very developer "friendly".

we still worked with PROMs and had to physically reprogram them each time we
changed the code.

tim

In message , at 15:03:06 on Sun, 14 Jul
2019, tim... remarked:

Nonsense! We wanted to create smaller, better, cooler handsets
just as much as "marketing" - and the ridiculous credit-card
sized SIM was a major barrier to that.

well yes

but I was referring to the move from standard to micro to nano SIMs

I wondered if you were, despite you replying in a subthread about the
CC-sized SIMs.

we still worked with PROMs and had to physically reprogram them each
time we changed the code.

Wow! Even back in the mid 80's we'd advanced to electrically
re-programming them, where I worked. Cutting those little links on the
PROM chip must have been really hard work for you.

In case you think I'm being facetious, I have seen ULA chips where a
small amount of [re]programming was done with a micro-scalpel.
--
Roland Perry

"tim..." Wrote in message:
counted...I don't recall working on "terminals" where memory was measured in peanuts
we had enough of it.

Ahh, POCSAG+ and 8051 microcontrollers with 256 bytes of RAM, how
I miss thee; and yes, while the GSM days were better - much less
incredibly ugly reusing-the-same-buffer-a-dozen
-times-in-different-places, we even had something approximating
malloc/free - wasting good memory on being able to handle a
completely unnecessary feature like changing SIM with the power
on would mean memory not going on something useful. I wrote the
first WAP/WML browser outside the original Unwired Planet
reference implementation (it was still called HDML at the time,
in fact), and fighting against memory constraints was a constant
battle...

The problem was it wasn't very developer "friendly".
we still worked with PROMs and had to physically reprogram them each time we changed the code.

We could at least afford EEPROMs and In-Circuit Emulators. But
they were horrendously unreliable pieces of kit (not least the
flimsy ribbon cables that connected the ICE to where the chip
would have been) that stopped working if someone in the next room
sneezed, so one of my first gigs was building a test framework
that massively improved development productivity. I didn't
emulate the CPU, so native assembly couldn't be tested in it -
fortunately there wasn't much of that about even then - but built
a set of libraries that would allow the entire phone to be
recompiled and run on a Sun Sparc workstation, with all the
hardware devices simulated by mocks. As I recall - and it is
25-odd years ago - I had fun getting even the DMA-accessed
peripherals to emulate right, with no code changes to the phone
source, even if it was bit-banging them - using Sys-V shared
memory segments... (Interrupts were emulated using Unix
signals...)

Writing the mock instances of things like the LCD controller chip
(which I rendered to the workstation screen using X) bug-for-bug
compatible with the hardware ones was genuinely great
fun...

Gloriously happy days.


--