Re: [Modern] Nationwide Number Portability MODERN Use Case Draft

[Henning Schulzrinne <[e-mail]>]

Even though it's rarely used without the aid of an address book, the all-numbers, least-common-denominator property still seems to matter. It might be the only thing you can read on a Chinese poster or a Korean hotel business card. This seems to be one of those cases where 100% coverage is much more valuable than 95% cases-covered. Often, if you need the phone number, you really need it, right now (and well beyond 911 and kin).

In many cases, the phone number has also become a (secondary) customer identifier, so converting to something else means updating the grocery store loyalty card, the bank customer database and similar systems. As long as humans write things less than calligraphy-quality, numbers also seem less likely to get confused (i vs. 1, O vs. 0, j vs. i, m vs. n).

________________________________________
From: Modern <[e-mail]> on behalf of Paul Kyzivat <[e-mail]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 1, 2016 1:07 PM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [Modern] Nationwide Number Portability MODERN Use Case Draft

On 2/29/16 6:52 PM, Richard Shockey wrote:
>
> If I had 5 dollars for every time I've heard “phone numbers are stupid”  “We need to use SIP URI’s". I would not be on this list but enjoying the sun at my retirement home on St. Barts or some other charming estate with my own private distillery making craft gin or calvados. I have yet to see a SIP URI on any Pizza Delivery vehicle.

Sure. But how many people discover how to order a pizza by looking at a
pizza car?

For that matter, what percentage of phone calls involve someone actually
typing in a phone number?

To the extent that the number is simply something listed in your address
book, or in a link on a web site, there is no real reason for it to be
an E.164 number.

The key feature of phone numbers is that there is a broadly
interoperable infrastructure for communicating between things identified
by those numbers.

        Thanks,
        Paul