The country’s telecoms regulator has just been given nearly £700,000 from BEIS (the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) to explore how Blockchain technology could improve the way UK landline telephone numbers are managed.
Between now and April 2020, says Ofcom, it plans to invite industry to help it “trial the porting and management of millions of telephone numbers” using Blockchain and ledger technology, co-ordinating this work across industry, universities and other third-party providers.
“We will be working with industry to explore how blockchain could make it quicker and easier for landline customers to switch providers while keeping their number – as well as reducing nuisance calls,” states its recently appointed new Chief Technology Officer, Mansoor Hanif.
“And we’ll expand our research into other areas where innovative technologies such as blockchain could be applied to benefit consumers.”
You may be surprised to learn that at least a billion landline telephone numbers are available in the UK, either already in use or reserved for allocation, with the body issuing blocks of these numbers to telecoms operators, who in turn manage the numbers and movement (porting) of them into and out of their control.
Previous attempts at building a centralised database to do all this have also foundered, says the announcement.
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The problem: our existing ways of doing this will be “challenged”, it warns, as telecommunication networks move from traditional analogue telephone lines to an all-IP (internet protocol) infrastructure.
Hence the idea of seeing if Blockchain could help both consumers and industry by:
- improved customer experience when moving a number between providers
- lower regulatory and business costs
- increased industry agility
- more effective management of nuisance calls and fraud.
Ofcom plans to share key learnings, best practices, and the underlying code base, where applicable, with other regulators, and it also expects that, “Communications businesses taking part in the project or using the code will also learn and develop new skills, leading to further innovation and wider uses of the technology.”
Ofcom is “the regulator for the communications services that we use and rely on each day”.
