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Toronto-area Woman Wants Freedom Mobile To Stop Assigning Her Phone Number To Other People (www.cbc.ca) 53

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
New submitter Goatbot writes: Another day another telco failure. Freedom Mobile repeatedly reassigned a customer's phone number. From the report: A Toronto-area woman says Freedom Mobile is still assigning her cell number to other people, even though she took the number with her when she moved to a new provider last year. Tsahai Carter, 22, made the switch last August. Since then, she says, on three separate occasions she's received phone calls and text messages intended for other people who'd been assigned the same number by Freedom Mobile. Carter, who lives north of Toronto in Markham, Ont., has also fielded phone calls from frustrated customers, wondering why someone else is getting their calls and messages. "They're getting mad at me for taking over their phone number, when really I had nothing to do with it," said Carter. "So it's a bit stressful." This isn't the first time Freedom Mobile customers have complained about a mix-up in phone numbers. In 2019, CBC reported on another customer who'd been given a number by Freedom Mobile that was still in use by someone else: a man who'd ported the number with him when he moved from Freedom to Fido.
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Toronto-area Woman Wants Freedom Mobile To Stop Assigning Her Phone Number To Other People More

Toronto-area Woman Wants Freedom Mobile To Stop Assigning Her Phone Number To Other People

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  • Is this really newsworthy? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @03:40PM (#61609003)

    Is this really newsworthy?

    Seems like something you would read on you local news website, but definitely doesn't seem like it fits on a site with a global audience like Slashdot.

    • Re:Is this really newsworthy? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @04:05PM (#61609095)

      Is this really newsworthy?

      Seems like something you would read on you local news website, but definitely doesn't seem like it fits on a site with a global audience like Slashdot.

      This is not a normal news site. This is "news for nerds". That someone managed to do such a completely fucked up implementation of number portability, something I've worked on, is honestly interesting news to me. If you think about it's kind of obvious this is would happen. Normal procedure when your customer leaves is to de-allocate their number and anyone who knows the basics of number handling should know that. That would be a basic requirement for implementing number portability. That people who have no clue about this are in charge of nationally important infrastructure, which cellphones are, should be important news for everyone. When America can't do basic telecoms any more that is real "end of times stuff".

      If this doesn't excite you then please find yourself a New York Times subscription. I'm sure they won't report this.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )

        When America can't do basic telecoms any more that is real "end of times stuff".

        This was in Canada, but other than that, you're dead on.

      • Freedom Mobile has revenues less than 1M CAD. I'm guessing they aren't the same folks running the national infrastructure.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by giesen ( 820885 )

          Freedom Mobile has revenues less than 1M CAD. I'm guessing they aren't the same folks running the national infrastructure.

          Not sure where you got that, but they are the 4th largest mobile operator in Canada. They have 1250 employees, which assuming we spread $1M evenly among them, means they make $800/each, excluding infrastructure costs. Some googling tells me they're up around the $800M/year mark.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            Not sure where you got that, but they are the 4th largest mobile operator in Canada. They have 1250 employees, which assuming we spread $1M evenly among them, means they make $800/each, excluding infrastructure costs. Some googling tells me they're up around the $800M/year mark.

            They're also like #3 in telecommunications overall.

            Freedom Mobile used to be known as Wind Mobile until the Big Three complained because its foreign owners (Egyptian company Wind) were a bit too foreign. So Shaw bought out Wind Mobil

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by c-A-d ( 77980 )

              https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wind-mobile-backer-regrets-canadian-launch-1.1013522

              Notable quotes:

              Canada is the only country in the world, besides China, that hasn't opened up to foreign direct investment for foreign capital, Sawiris said. "I don't know why Canada wants to be matched with China," he said. "There's only two countries [with] very ridiculous old laws, and nothing is happening."

              Sawiris said Canada's antiquated telecom rules are destined to hurt the economy's productivity and dampen innovation

              • The investment of public pension fund dollars in telecommunications and banking dictates the foreign investment. As much as we complain in Canada about the cost of Banking, Utilities and Telecommunications in Canada they are what keep our pension funds flush. That's just my take on it.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by c-A-d ( 77980 )

            Being the "fourth largest" in Canada isn't saying much when there are only four companies that cover the entire country. (The others are either VMNOs or regional operators.)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Guspaz ( 556486 )

              Perhaps, but as an overall company, Shaw (who owns the Freedom Mobile brand) has annual revenue of $5.407 billion, which is a mite higher than the "less than 1M CAD" that was claimed.

              Even if you want to claim that we should ignore the whole company and just focus on Freedom Mobile, they have a 6% market share in an industry with an annual revenue of $27.1 billion, per government data: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/publica... [crtc.gc.ca]

        • Freedom Mobile is actually owned by Shaw the 4th largest communications company. In order to create competition the existing companies created subsidiaries that offered budget rates. Basically an end run to protect us from the big bad global communications companies.
    • Tell me how news worthy when someone starts being a BOFH and starts selling essentially cloned phones. This is exploitable in so many ways that zero trust should be assigned to the phone number.

  • Telecom needs to update its infrastructure. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday July 22, 2021 @03:42PM (#61609007)

    There are way too many things that shouldn't happen with our telecom services today. But the Telecos just wave their hands and say there isn't anything we can do about it.

    Oh look anyone can fake caller ID, and we cannot possibly track back the caller... However they do know who to send the phone bill too, as well to route the call so both people can communicate with each other.

    People with duplicate phone numbers, most modern databases have a feature that forces unique entries... USE IT!!

    For those without unlimited plans, why does Texting cost so much, while messaging over your data plan is much cheaper.

    The Telco industry really needs a kick in butt. Without politicians coming to their aid.

    • Given the SMS is, inherently, was built into the CDMA protocol, there really should be no charge. It wasnâ(TM)t like they added SMS after the fact.

      • In my country when cell phones started becoming common, sms was free, as in neither of the two providers charged for it or even mentioned it in their contracts.
        Then people started using it a lot, so suddenly it was charged for. The local telecoms regulator let them do that.
        Calls to voicemail were still free though, so that was nice. Until one of the providers began charging for that too. The following week the other provider started charging and the regular said nothing.
        Our problem has always been poo

      • Voice calls were built into CDMA. That's not the argument, more like the transmission costa being negligible, the real expense in servers and interconnects, and probably 60% of the cost in administering the fees...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      People with duplicate phone numbers, most modern databases have a feature that forces unique entries... USE IT!!

      That's not the issue. Number portability isn't a database, it's a protocol - a strange, byzantine protocol, which has participants issue messages, which all other competing participants then use to update their own individual databases. The phone network isn't some neat system with exactly one view of it all.

      This is a case of multiple operators disagreeing over who has control of a phone number, probably because somewhere a message got lost or interpreted differently. Someone could have lost a day's worth o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 )
      Largely you're correct, but there is nuance on the side of the telco. Obviously they can trace back the caller to a certain extent., at least to the injection point. However, there is a lot of crap that they can do to make it difficult from there. Further, the telco cannot provide trace info to the customer. However, they will provide the information to law enforcement when requested. What is done with the info after that is up to them.

  • In the US, physicians are often given permission leaving messages on a personâ(TM)s voicemail or even text.

    Having the number assigned to another could violate privacy and HIPA rules making the carrier liable. I assume Canada has similar laws? A lawsuit alleging these violations might actually get someone if there are monetary damages and bad PR.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      Having the number assigned to another could violate privacy and HIPA rules making the carrier liable.

      Not even a little bit, the carrier didn't sign any HIPAA business associate agreements (BAA) with anyone involved, and HIPPA has specific exceptions carved out for phone calls and faxes excluding them from the more stringent rules of ePHI. (electronic patient health records) -- which is why your doctor doesn't have or require a BAA agreement with them. (Not to mention the fact that a call may be routed between multiple telecoms)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )

        vux984 is correct. Telecom carriers are not Covered Entities under HIPAA, unless they have signed a BAA.

    • In the US, physicians are often given permission leaving messages on a personÃ(TM)s voicemail or even text.

      My last land line number apparently used to belong to a doctor's office. I kept getting calls from people with sensitive medical information left in the messages even though the outgoing message didn't say anything about medical care. People are fucking stupid.

  • One nice thing about 3rd world countries is that if you pay enough you can bribe services to put shit right. The down-side is you have to bribe often because stuff is F'd up.

  • This is a major issue for people who depend upon 2FA and their mobile number to authenticate. I personally have had this happen and lost access to my primary Google account that was created in 2007. Of course all the other accounts were tied to that google account, including my old slashdot account ~wwbbs. Seems to me all I need to do is either socially engineer a minimum wage customer service representative or pay someone off to assign my phone someone else's number. Now considering you can buy a phon
  • That shit has been happening to me too! I've had my number for over a decade, and I've ported it from many different providers. I get calls for other people a lot. I'm gonna go ahead and blame the government for fucking up the interoperability of porting numbers to other networks in Canada, because well. That's all the Canadian government is good for.
    • It's not just the Canadian government but regulators in general. Hard to create legislation to retroactively regulate technology. Canada already pretty much eliminated analog line cards and now everyone that has a physical landline has dsl and the dial tone is being served out of a central office in a different exchange. A DMS 100 doesn't get replaced often well perhaps more often than a 300 or 500 series.

  • Some years ago my phone number looked like a business number (294-9400) and I found out what kind of business it had been (no, nothing nasty) when I kept getting calls looking for them.

    "No, this isn't XYZ Co." "They aren't in business and haven't been for a while." "I have no idea how to contact them" "No, I can't help you." This just didn't compute with some people.

    When I moved to a new part of town the phone company asked if I wanted to keep my old phone number. NO.

    ...laura

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