Has the Telephone Company Got Your Number?

This is how things are supposed to go: you buy a phone, you sign up for a plan and you get a new phone number -- that is unless you're Marc Mysterio. The internationally known DJ had just returned from England to Toronto after working with Samantha Fox on his UK hit single 'Tomorrow.' (Remember, 'Touch Me?') and he needed a phone.

"I bought this Wind Mobile phone from Blockbuster. It was a great deal, at first. $22.50 a month for the first 6 months, no contracts, pre-paid, unlimited talk/text/long distance in Canada," he says.

But then he started giving out the number to business contacts, many of whom were record executives and celebrity collaborators, and when they tried phoning him, they heard the following message: "You have reached an invalid number, please check the number and dial again." Obviously something was up, but when Mysterio got in touch with Wind Mobile to solve the problem, the reason behind it caught him off guard. He had received a number from "a new batch of numbers" that not all carriers are yet aware of. The solution WIND offered was even more surprising.

"Good afternoon, As per our conversation regarding unable to receive calls from xxx-xxx-xxxx. We recommend that you have the customer at xxx-xxx-xxxx open a service ticket with their carrier -- Rogers," wrote technical support & data Representative Margret Arsenault in an e-mail.

I bet you can imagine the conversation had Mysterio taken her advice: "Hello there, high-power record executive. Would you mind phoning your phone carrier and asking them to recognize my actually legitimate number? What? You mean you handle millions of dollars a day and have bigger fish to fry? It's not your job to clean up my mess and you never want to hear from me again?"

"I am considering legal action against Wind Mobile since there was not a disclaimer of any sort to the effect of 'Hey, we will give you this great deal, but we may also make you look like a schmuck to your colleagues when they try to call you and it looks like you gave them a bum number.' I'm sure I've lost business because of this now," asserts Mysterio.

So what happened? Why would a brand new number suddenly become invisible when punched into the phone line and why was it up to those who tried to phone it to convince their carriers that it was indeed real? It was time to dig a little deeper.Wind Mobile has only been in the Canadian communications market since December 2009, so it was only natural to assume that this phenomenon was the result of growing pains experienced by a new company. Had Mysterio chosen a more established company to carry his cellphone calls, he wouldn't be having this problem. But according to Wind's own Chief Marketing Officer Scott Campbell, the rabbit hole goes a little deeper than that.

"I don't think it has anything to do with the number of carriers making the marketplace more competitive, it is simply that there are more and more numbers being used in general. Even if there was only one carrier serving all of North America there would be as many numbers needed as possible because there are more and more devices out there. Even companies that have been around for 125 years are implementing new blocks of numbers."

He went on to explain that the snafu Marc Mysterio experienced is restricted to numbers within North America since both the United States and Canada share '1' as their country code, so both countries share the database where new numbers get implemented and all carriers across the continent are notified to turn the switch and activate them. Under strict CRTC and FCC rules, every carrier has 66 days to activate new numbers. After that time is up, the number is given to the customer and it is supposed to work -- except of course in Mysterio's case.

"In this case we followed all the steps and then ran all of our standard tests with major operators and it seemed to be operating correctly, so we released the number to the client," says Campbell, who points to an industry wide problem as the origin of Mysterio's experience. "The challenge is you can test, but there's well over 2,000 switches and big or small carriers. A big carrier could implement the numbers, but may have missed a bunch of switches or implemented the number slightly wrong, or they might not even seen that you posted and in this case, that appears to be what happened. There is a carrier in eastern Canada and one in Florida that haven't implemented our numbers correctly."

So then why does it become the customer's responsibility to contact the person trying to call them and ask their contact to lobby their carrier? Shouldn't Wind be doing the dirty work in this case? Mysterio himself certainly thinks so: "I find that Wind Mobile was careless, negligent and capricious by issuing numbers to customers that may not be recognized by various large carriers. It is quite a deception and not worth the savings," he says. "I am not going to tell Samantha Fox, journalists wishing to interview me, executives from Sony Music and Universal in Europe to do this, or managers for pop stars in America. it is Wind's fault for issuing me a faulty number and failing to correct it."

Campbell has an answer, and in this case he contends that Wind is a victim of the competitive nature of the industry. "We only find out about this problem stemming from isolated areas when, unfortunately, it happens to one of our customers, which none of us want. We then try to reach out the carriers, but the thing is they aren't all that responsive to our requests. This industry is so competitive that they won't open a trouble ticket unless you're a customer."

As a result, patrons calling the suspect carrier helps speed up the fix for the customer whose number isn't recognized, a reason that didn't end up being conveyed to Mysterio and something Campbell now apologizes for. "Obviously, we could've done a better job in terms of communication in this case and for that, we're sorry." It probably has cost them a customer, since Mysterio insists that he told them the nature of his career prevented him from fixing this himself (not that he was going to) and Wind didn't hear him. Mysterio's already planning to switch to Virgin Mobile, despite Wind's efforts to rectify the problem by finding a customer of the carrier in question and getting them to open a ticket on Mysterio's behalf.

So how can you avoid a similar fate when you buy a new phone? "I would caution that this is a pretty isolated event. Certainly if you're porting numbers from one company to another that number has been established for a long period of time. You'll see the new numbering block situation happen on occasion, but if you think of the massive universe of phone numbers it's actually a really small percentage," says Campbell.

He explained that chances are, if this happens to you, your provider will recommend the same thing Wind did and you'll have to decide whether social protocol allows you to ask the caller to phone their own provider. To avoid this, always take your old phone number with you whenever possible and avoid the off chance of a hassle.