In 2007 the European Commission introduced the pan-european national short codes 116xxx called “Harmonised service of social value”. Assignees of this type of numbers should be organization active in the social sector, so usually these are non-profit organizations. This causes an issue with another requirement of the 116xxx phone numbers, the calls to the phone numbers must be free of charge. In a usual situation this implies that the called party pays for the calls. In some countries the fees per minute payable for this type of calls is much higher than for normal calls, in Luxembourg the fee payable on interconnect links (inter operator fees) are more than 2 times higher. At the end this puts an enormous financial load on organizations which usually don’t have much revenue.
Several solutions to this issue are possible, I present some here but feel free to provide your comments.
- No changes
- Operators bear the costs of the call inside their own network
- Multi-Homing with free On-Net calls
- Multi-Homing with free interconnect termination and transit Continue reading “Limiting operational costs for assignee of 116xxx phone numbers for services of social value”