South Korea to let landline phone users switch to Internet telephone without changing numbers
By Dusan Belic on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 10:11 AM PST In General
When you have so developed telecommunications industry like South Korea does, it’s only logical to allow your citizens to roam between landline, mobile and VoIP phones. That being said, the Korean government is preparing to introduce a new rule that will allow landline phone users to switch to Internet-based telephone carriers without changing their phone numbers!
The “number portability” rule will be introduced during the first half of next year and will certainly hurt traditional telephone companies such as KT Corp. On the other hand, end users will benefit from substantially lower monthly phone bills…
[Via: textually.org]
ISPs here in France mostly permit this since a couple of years now. the one called “Free” mainly. I have directly opened a line using an IP number (09 code) so I’m not concerned, by my father for instance had the choice to get his landline number ‘ported’ to his voip line (actually, it gives him two numbers for one phone).
There is a quirk though. Landline number are geographically linked, cut into 5 big regions (paris/center and each ‘corner’) so if you move too far, you lose for sure your number.
Anyways, people are used have VoIP number and many like me don’t even have a classic landline anymore (Digital HD TV + DVB Tuner + PVR + 24Mbs ADSL2+ + Free phone to 70 countries for 30€/month, who cares about classical landline ?
)
The next step will be portability between VoIP operators/ISP’s … that’ll be something !
JaXX./.