No. 19.... December 1995
Issued by the Oftel Numbering Unit
50 Ludgate Hill, London, EC4M 7JJ
Enquiries - Telephone: 0171 634 8758; Fax: 0171 634 8943
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Numbering Bulletins are published monthly by the Oftel Numbering Unit. Bulletins are available on Oftel's Internet pages (/).
There has been widespread support for the proposals for a reformed Telecoms Numbering and Addressing Body and a new Numbering Policy Advisory Group set out in last month's Bulletin. All those entitled to membership of TNAB under the terms of their licences or pursuant to an application for membership will be informed individually by letter from Oftel. Anyone who has not been notified by the end of January and who wishes to be included should contact the Numbering Unit. The old TNAB will cease to be recognised as soon as membership of the new body has been finalised. Details of the membership of the Advisory Group will be finalised during January.
Coopers & Lybrand and Oftel have begun work on the Study of numbering demand. A small workshop is to be held in early January to provide an initial opportunity for the Coopers team to discuss with Oftel and a small number of network operators the technical details of the requirements specification for the Study. A wider consultative meeting on the Study will be held on 7 February; operators and user groups will be contacted during January with details.
Oftel will also be using some of its audit visits (see below) to discuss with operators how and in what proportions they have allocated numbers to different services. Oftel will continue this information gathering exercise through January.
The results of the Demand Study will be used by Oftel as a tool to develop and test strategic options for the Numbering Scheme which will be debated through the new consultative mechanisms.
The first meeting of the publicity task force took place on 15th December attended by operators who provide service in the Reading area. The group discussed the division of responsibility for publicising the code change. Each operator will arrange to inform its own customers, whilst Oftel will promote awareness of the change and relevant dates to groups representing local user bodies.
BT has agreed to chair an Operators Network Co-ordination Group for the code change. Through this group all operators' national and regional network changes can be co-ordinated and implemented in a consistent and organised way.
The first stage of a Code of Practice on Number Conservation has been drafted and circulated to the Project Team on Conservation. The Team will meet in January to finalise the draft and to agree on measures to be considered for the second and subsequent stages. Any resulting changes to the Numbering Unit's working practices and to the Conventions will be published in the Bulletin and be subject to the normal consultation procedures.
The 1995 Audit is underway. Operators are required under Convention A9 to submit an Annual Numbering Return to the Numbering Unit containing information about number allocations, reservations and forecasts at the calendar year end. The Numbering Unit wrote to operators on 29 November identifying the information required: the aim this year has been to reduce the burden on operators by concentrating on key areas and key information requirements.
The Return is to be submitted to Oftel by 31 January and the data collected will be summarised in a non-commercially sensitive form in the Numbering Unit's Annual Report.
To assist operators in preparing their Returns, the Unit is arranging a series of meetings to take place in December and January with operators in key areas.
BT has not yet been able to confirm that the upgrade of its TXE4 exchanges (to provide capability for them to deal with four-digit access codes) has been completed. No change has therefore been made to the Status of codes protected to allow operators access from TXE4 exchanges through the use of an effective three-digit code. However, it is our expectation that confirmation will be received from BT during January and that Protected codes, not subject to current applications, will automatically be changed to Free. The Numbering Unit wrote to the operators concerned on 3 November.
The complete List of the Specified Numbering Scheme is now available on Oftel's pages on the Internet as a series of tables. The tables are updated monthly.
The S-Digit 1 tables include two fields: "Change" which indicates that a record has changed in the indicated month; and "Length" , which gives the code and number length associated with each DE block. The other SNS tables will also have a "Change" field.
The previous method of providing lists of changes on the Internet has been discontinued.
Further detail on how to unload the SNS from the Internet is given on the Oftel Numbering Unit home page.
As announced in the December 1995 Numbering Bulletin, only new Allocations and Reservations are now shown in the Tables at Annex A. Detail on other changes, e.g. Allocated to Protected, Protected to Free can be found on the Internet version of the Numbering Scheme.
Numbering capacity that has been Reserved now shows Withheld in the 'Operator' column rather than simply leaving the column entry blank. This avoids the possible interpretation that information has been inadvertently omitted.
The Status of the Access Code 132, allocated to MCL by BT before determination of the Specified Numbering Scheme, has been confirmed. This is shown in Annex 1.
Details of the changes to the Numbering Scheme during December are listed in Annex 1 and summarised in the table below:
Area Numbering Range
Allocations 45
Reservations 25
Other Changes 0
Mobiles Numbering Range
Allocations 0
Reservations 0
Other Changes 0
Personal Numbering Range
Allocations 3
Reservations 0
Other Changes 0
Special Services Numbering Range
Allocations 11
Reservations 2
Other Changes 2
Access Codes
Allocations 10
Reservations 0
Other Changes 2
Total Number of Changes 100