When a phone company intentionally Dumps a number
Whenever a toll free number is disconnected it goes through a four month disconnect process. There are several reasons for this. It allows the old customer to reactivate it if they just discover that it was disconnected. It minimizes the amount of wrong numbers or misdials from previous advertising. It is the safety net that prevents mistakes from turning into major problems. It is possible for a resporg to intentionally push a number out of this 4 month aging process. We call this “Dumping” a number, but it is extremely rare because it takes extra work and it creates a potential liability for the company with virtually no benefit or reason other than perhaps saving 80 cents worth of sms charges.
The only reason that phone companies sometimes dump numbers this is to transfer a number to another company without them having to give it directly to the other company. This is sometimes done so that they can say that they just released it and so the other company picking it up can say that they just picked it up out of the spare pool so that they don’t have any obligation and didn’t have to send any paperwork to the previous phone company. This is not a safe or appropriate way to transfer a number and it is only done in questionable circumstances to say the least.
You can tell when this attempt to “clean” it is done by looking at the date and times of the release and the pickup. If a number is picked up almost instantly there is usually some communication there and that doesn’t happen by accident. The extra steps required to bypass the four month aging process also mean that it can’t be done by accident.
The only organization that dumps numbers regularly is Signal One. They do this because they pick up and drop huge volumes of numbers per month and saving the 20 cents per month carrying costs while a number is in disconnect saves them a significant amount of expense. But they don’t have regular customers in the traditional sense, so there is no real danger of releasing someone else’s number by mistake in that case and the volume makes even the minor carrying costs worth the extra effort.
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Bill Quimby (510 comments.) says:
November 8, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Loren Stocker of Vanity International, this bud is for YOU!
-Bill
Bill Quimby (510 comments.) says:
November 11, 2008 at 12:29 pm
A customer contacted me today with another example. He was away and PhonePeople.com (formerly TollFreeLive.com) disconnected his number back in July. Phone companies have the right and need to disconnect customers at times. That’s not the issue. But when a phone company not only disconnects their customer’s number and PUSHES it into the SPARE or Available pool without letting it go through the industry standard, four month aging process they create a liability to the customer.
This number wasn’t taken for a month until 8/22 by Signal One, a phone company that gets numbers for the wrong numbers. The customer contacted me a couple times and has the number on 30,000 flyers, in yellow pages, on business cards and so forth, not to mention all of the past customers etc. This number also matched his local number so although it looks random and isn’t overly valuable to anyone else, it’s actually very important and not easily replaced or matched. The customer has offered to prepay for the service for a year, but Phone People went out of their way and intentionally pushed this number into the spare pool to save the 80 cents it would cost to hold it on their resporg.
This is the epitome of being “penny wise and pound foolish” and it also shows why other things besides the price or a phone service, matter a great deal. In my opinion Phone People is liable for this customers loss because they didn’t follow the industry standards and intentionally caused this damage to their customer. The ironic part is that Signal One isn’t advertising the number. They just got it to use for it’s wrong numbers and to play an advertising about their over priced directory assistance service. But that’s another subject for a different post.
I will definitely post any other resolution or news I hear about this here.
Bill