The launch follows successful user trials that saw the recruitment of 10+ participating carrier and vendor members. Now i3forum is inviting the industry at large to join the initiative and share best practices and insights on numbering plans.
“To fix these issues, we’ve created a platform to be the place to go to exchange numbering plan updates and collaborate with experts from around the world," said Philippe Millet, founder and chair of i3forum and chair of the numbering workgroup.
"We’re launching something extremely innovative that has never been done before: a Numbering Plan community where experts across the industry can exchange information and key insights into numbering plan interpretations, sources (both authoritative and non-authoritative), commercial applications, fraud trends, and more.”
Numbering plans provide a standardised framework for addressing, routing, and identifying communications across networks. There lacks a single source that has granular, up-to-date, operationally relevant knowledge of the numbering plan for each country or market.
Updates and changes also take long to propagate with sources and information often unclear or inaccessible, which in turn creates issues, ranging from fraud, disputes, and under-optimisation of routing and pricing to unintentionally enabling unwanted and illegal communications.
“The platform is not a central database capturing global numbering plans. It complements what vendors are doing in terms of building reference databases," added Millet.
"Monthly calls are also held by the numbering workgroup for the community to engage with one another and openly talk about issues or share timely, accurate numbering plan data and expertise with industry peers.”
Traditional members include both professionals directly managing their company’s global numbering plan and those applying it to their respective business functions.
“The Numbering Plan Community is a collaborative space to exchange valuable numbering plan insights with the industry," added Jamie Fisher, destination and carrier account manager at Telstra.
"We can easily share our own numbering plan expertise and in turn, get timely news & updates from our peers. These fresh insights can help us to better optimise our A-Z offers to the benefit of our business and our customers."
