Number Plan Management and Analysis
Whereas markets in commodities such as pork bellies or oil have agreed definitions and arbitrating bodies for the commodities they trade, the carrier-carrier market has no agreed definitions of its destinations. Every carrier uses the International Telecommunication Union E.164 standard for country codes, but each carrier uses different codes for destinations within a country, usually because it is using different suppliers within that country. So one carrier's codes for Cali may not be the same as another's. This applies especially to mobile operators. While the difference in price between a call to a land-line and a call to a mobile may not seem much at 9 UK pence, the volumes can be one hundred thousand minutes a day or more, leading to losses of over £250,000 a month. When a carrier's dial code table can contain three thousand items, comparing codes is a critical and complex part of the process. The theory of dial code relationships actually involves the mathematical theory of lattices and code comparisons have to be done with computer software.
Number plan management monitors changes in suppliers' dial codes and adds or removes codes from the company's own code tables to improve costs. Implementing the changes across the company's switches, billing systems, calling card and other IN platforms is a significant task for the engineering and billing departments.
Read more about this topic: Least-cost Routing
Famous quotes containing the words number, plan, management and/or analysis:
“No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition. It reduces their supporters to that tractable number which can be managed by the joint influences of fruition and hope. It offers vengeance to the discontented, and distinction to the ambitious; and employs the energies of aspiring spirits, who otherwise may prove traitors in a division or assassins in a debate.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“Make a plan and you will find she has something else in mind;”
—Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986)
“People have described me as a “management bishop” but I say to my critics, “Jesus was a management expert too.””
—George Carey (b. 1935)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)