Bill on keeping cellphone numbers across networks filed

[leo_trams]

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Are you certain that cellphone providers charge cellular providers? Why would they charge licenses to use their handsets? The cellular providers have all the cards when dealing with what handsets they carry on their network. If anything, the cellular makers will pay carriers to have their handsets on a certain network. Most cellphone makers cater to the carriers and not the other way around, ie: AT&T catering to Apple or Globe catering to Apple. If you are not sure what fees are involved or how cash is traded, then it is best not to speculate. You mention database ... what database? ... and why do Philippine carriers have to pay cellphone manufacturers anything? Do Philippine carriers not have their own engineers to manage the network and the users? Do they have to buy Cellphone Office 2011? What is this license that carriers have to pay for that you speak of?

As far as area codes, Cebu can be given many area codes and that is the logical way to add more numbers. Many metropolitan areas in the US have many telephone area codes.

When it comes to capacity, adding more is trivial ... all carriers need to do is invest in them.

When you purchase a cellular equipment the most important is the brain/CPU. it holds subscriber records and not handset records. the cellular network is transparent to all handsets provided they are of the same technology. when you buy equipment(complete) you are only given an x capacity of subscriber records. if you want to add more subscribers you need software upgrade and or licenses to open up the "locked" records. And when you increase subscriber record capacity (the brain), you need to expand your radios(frequency)cell sites, your circuits, your trunks..., cellular providers must also pay for the frequency use.

capacity could be trivial but having more is wasteful and having less is a disadvantage.

back to the numbers game.
if the Philippines right now has 80million subscribers...imagine putting all the numbers in one cellular provider, say SUN cellular. But not all the numbers are actually in SUN's network, but because the bill mandates that SUN has to accommodate "future" churn, SUN now has to buy an equipment that can accommodate that 80million probable subscribers, so GLOBE and SMART also has to buy an equipment that can accommodate 80 million subs...this could be trivial but businessmen cellular providers will let the active subscribers pay for the unused capacity.

A similar event happened years ago during the early days of texting.
Texting before was FREE but because of abuse...sudden surge of text traffic(capacity shortage) that affected(delayed text/network busy) all subscribers. A huge traffic needs additional equipment...but how do you recover investment if you offer text for FREE? You cannot charge it to voice users... so, they have to charge "texting".

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[leo_trams]

re:licenses
you can also compare this to servers and workstations.
you dont need a 50workstation license NOS when you only need 3 actual workstations in your office, sayang ang 47 vacant workstations.

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[vern]

I understand what licenses are ... however unless they do things differently in the Philippines, which I highly doubt, why must telcos there pay the companies you mention? Why would telcos buy equipment that is locked down by software and not by capability. That's like them buying shareware. I'm curious to know if you actually know this because of experience in the telecom industry ... or just speculation?