The FCC has suggested in letters that it may ration 855 numbers when they come out but hasn’t confirmed or specified how this will be done yet. I wanted to take a moment to explain why this isn’t just important, it’s absolutely critical to the process, and to all real customers.

I wrote a detailed post yesterday about the differences between vanity number phone companies and regular phone companies because that’s necessary to understand why rationing is so critical. When 866 numbers came out in 2000, vanity number resporgs were the exception rather than the rule. Sure there was a mad rush and the whole system bogged down. But regular phone companies weren’t competing against Vanity Number Businesses who’s whole purpose is to suck up numbers as fast as possible.

Vanity number businesses get to keep the value of the numbers they get, where as regular phone companies just give the numbers they get to customers without any real payment for the acquisition at all. Many regular companies use the volume of calls to subsidize the set up cost, so they actually spend money getting new numbers for their customers, they don’t make any.

That means that the vanity number businesses can afford way more connections and capacity to get numbers from the SMS/800 database than even the biggest phone companies could possibly justify. They also have more experience at sucking up numbers too. So without rationing, the vanity number businesses would literally suck up a humongous amount of numbers before regular customers at regular phone companies even had a chance. Rationing the numbers means that even smaller phone companies will at least get to submit some requests before the vanity number businesses suck up everything IF the rationing is done in small enough increments.

If the rationing isn’t very restrictive or if it’s only done monthly, it will still fail and hurt real customers. A vanity number business with a million numbers and more sucking capacity than regular phone companies at say half of one percent of their previous active numbers, as one industry organization has suggested, will be able to get 50,000 numbers. If that was spread out over a month, that wouldn’t be that bad. But if they are allowed to take their whole ration at once, it’ll either kill or cripple the 800 database, and mean that the vanity number brokers and squatters probably get over 100,000+ numbers before regular phone companies have much of a chance to get anything.

For a real life example, CallSource.com grabbed over 10,000 out of the 22,000 new “800″ numbers released in 2009 in less than two minutes.

If they break the ration down into a DAILY ration, it’ll help protect the 800 database from overload and insure that at least some requests from regular phone companies get through a lot earlier. Vanity number businesses also don’t care if they use up their whole monthly ration in the first night, where as regular phone companies won’t want to use up their whole month’s requests right away. So not only does there have to be a Strict Rationing system but it has to be limited DAILY, not simply per month!

Lets hope the FCC understands this and doesn’t put the vanity number brokers and squatters above the real customers!

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