« 2004: Looking Forward to a Great Year Ahead! | Main | The New Phone Game: AT&T Story in LA Times »
January 01, 2004
Should the FCC allocate a special area code for IP Communications?
After reading the recent story in Red Herring news about Japan's IP Telephony area code, 050, I'm thinking once again that maybe we should put the process in motion to in effect ask the FCC to allocate a special "experimental" area code for those of us who would like to experiment with IP Communication related services.
At least with a non-geographic area code there should be no expectation of e911 services from consumers and the folks who administer the North American Numbering Plan at NANCY should not have any complaints about either numberspace exhaustion or the distribution of non-geographic area codes around the world.
While the usage of such numbers would make it possibly easier for some Governments to regulation IP Communications, I believe the benefits of launching such an experiment for outweigh the consequences and this is something which should be pursued.
I briefly spoke to Commissioner Martin about such a concept for the US during the FCC VoIP Forum on December 1st and I will look to continue the dialog into the New Year.
Posted by jeff on January 1, 2004 04:22 AM | Permalink
Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos