[Tagging] [Key:phone] - Suggesting wiki page changing

[Paul Allen]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2019 at 09:04, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> I don't see the problem, can you explain?
>

[Note: some simplifications ahead.  Broadly true but there are many
exceptions in
reality.]

In the UK, calling rom landlines, calls to mobile numbers are more
expensive than calls
to landlines.  These days, not by much but in the past the difference was
large.  BT's prices are
a 23p call setup charge then 15p/minute to landlines and 18p/minute to
mobiles.  Unless you
have one of their packages that give you free calls to landlines (not even
a setup charge) but
9p/minute to mobiles (with the 23p setup).

There are no guarantees that this won't change in the future:  Maybe for
the better, maybe for the
worse.

If you're calling from a mobile phone then the charging situation is
complex.  Depending on
which MNO or MVNO you're using, it may be very complex (although it's not
as bad as it used
to be).  Generally it has been the case in the past that if you were
calling from a mobile it was
cheaper to call another mobile than a landline,  These days there's either
no difference or
it's small, but that could change.

Fortunately, in the UK, mobile numbers start with a 7 and non-mobile
numbers do not (other
potentially-expensive calls have different prefixes).

The situation is different elsewhere in the world, of course.  In the US
it's the callee, not
the caller, who pays the call charges for calls to mobiles.  Oh the joys of
living in a country
where you not only get junk advertising calls on your mobile, but you have
to pay to receive
them.

By the way, this is not about Italy. In Germany [1] and likely in many
> other places you can also get your landline number on a mobile phone. I'm
> using a German landline number for almost 20 years on my desktop and for 10
> years on my mobile. It is not new technology, and it can be used
> everywhere, not just in Italy.  Another possibility would be call redirect.
> No way to tell where a number will be routed to (if you aren't a telco).
>

Number remapping, of one form or another, has been around for a long time.
But 20 years ago
it was expensive and rare.  After regulations requiring number portability
for mobile owners
switching between carriers, the technology became cheaper to implement.
I'm not sure if UK
companies offer anything other than redirection when it comes to
terminating a landline on a
mobile or a mobile on a landline but if they do I'd expect call charges to
be appropriate to
the number prefix.

So people do find it useful to know if a phone number is to a landline or a
mobile.  Less so
than in the past, because the cost difference is smaller, but still
useful.  However, in the UK
we can tell by inspecting the number: if it starts with a 7 it's a mobile.
So in the UK we don't
need a tag to tell us.  This isn't true of all countries: in the US you
can't tell if you're calling
a landline or a mobile, but you don't care because the person receiving the
call is paying.

-- 
Paul
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