Specifically - I have been involved in 800phone sex for almost 20 years. The way the services operate have us place the numbers into the bureau’s name and under their control. They pay the transport fees and pay us based on billable revenue.

I want to know about gaining control over my numbers. I have been reading about and gathering information on the resporg process. If I understand correctly, I could utilize a “be your own resporg” service or an independent resporg — and by doing so, would guarantee that the ownership of the numbers remains with me.

Example: http://oncallresporgsvcs.com/

I understand that you are in indep resporg as well.

Would this method solve my issues about protecting the number?

And does it come down to how much I trust the indep resporg as well?

Joel

There are two levels of control or protection you could get. The first is just transferring a number over to them rather than using one that they provided. You don’t want them to be able to say that they provided that number as part of their service, so you can cancel their service but you can’t take their number with you if you want to leave. You can overcome this be obtaining a number with independent proof of ownership and transferring the number over to them. That way if you can prove that you had the number active before you transferred it to them you will be able to transfer it away.

The second level of control would be to use a third party resporg service for the ongoing service. That is stronger than simply having proof that you had it active before transferring it because you’re not turning over the resporg to the service. The service wouldn’t ever be able to stop you from taking it away because it wouldn’t under their control at all if they just give you a local number to send the calls to and you handle the cost of getting the calls to that local number.

We can help you in either case if you want it. Any number you get from us is active and we provide the best proof of ownership in the industry. More importantly we also back that up and will help to prove your ownership or resolve any issue related to the ownership and control or portability of your toll free number. We always try to resolve it first by communicating with all of the parties. But we have occasionally had to go further and yank numbers or even fight to protect the ownership of our customer.

We don’t provide the ongoing service, but we do maintain the resporg for our customers that select Opex. We set that up to make the process faster and we work together fairly well. We don’t promote that as a benefit as much as we probably should, but we definitely protect not only your ownership but your customer information as well.

Your comment about having to be confident in the resporg is true. I don’t know anything about the resporg service you mentioned. Their website looks fine but it’s kind of shallow. If you want to evaluate independent resporg services you should also certainly look at ATL (ATLC.com). They are a very good service.

There is one other way you could get an independent resporg without even paying any more, and that’s to use a service that uses ATL. I’m going to do some research on this and write an article on it. But to summarize that, if you use a company like Touch Tone Communications, to route the calls to the local number of the service bureau it’s kind of like using a domain name proxy service to hide your name from the whois information.

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any other questions or need help with anything else.

.Bill Quimby.