I believe every POTS phone number is separately portable, at least within the geographic area ... you can switch your POTS number between providers and to cellular or VoIP providers. Business numbers are transferable (and have been for longer than general portability) ... in the case I was associated with, my principals chose not to take over the failing business' numbers only because to do so would have meant paying significant delinquint bills. Not that I believe there is a large market for the sale of POTS numbers, just that at some level, exchange is possible. You can also purchase a virtual phone number having the phone company place a permenant forward in the switch to some other location. Then you pay call charges based on the distance between the virtual number's switch and the forwarded to number. On 3 Aug 2007, John Levine wrote: > >I don't see whay you can't sell your phone number. > > You can sell your 800/888/877/866 number, but not your POTS number. > > Toll free numbers are more like domain names, in that you have to find > a provider to host it and to put an entry into the DNS-like database > that phone switches consult to decide how to route the call. Ordinary > phone numbers are more like IP addresses in that the first part of the > number is used to route calls (give or take some portability details > that don't really affect this argument.) Your phone company owns your > phone number. > > >If you have a good number (lucky digits, etc.) I bet you could sell > >it off. > > If it's a toll free number, sure, there's a robust market. If it's a > POTS number, forget it. > > This isn't exactly analogous to IP addresses, but the routing > nightmares that would result if every phone number were separately > portable is similar to what would happen if people started taking > their /28's with them. I expect you'll find that each local phone as a switch based physical address. There has to be a DNS-like lookup or ICMP-like redirect which maps POTS numbers to physical phones. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf