
The User Experience of Mobile Phone Numbers - vviktor
https://medium.com/@vfonic/the-user-experience-of-mobile-phone-numbers-4507deee3495
======
raverbashing
Whenever I hear a rant about SIM cards I just mentally think that this person
hasn't thought about the problem for 5 seconds longer than needed.

"Oh CDMA proves you don't need a SIM card" \- the stupidity HURTS

Given his difficulty in "buying a SIM card" (which I've done in several
countries and it was never as difficult as portrayed) I can see why

\- SIM cards makes switching telcos EASIER as CDMA phones need the company to
issue an UIMID before you can do anything with it (while SIM cards talk to the
company and do that - they're tiny computers) - oh and btw newer CDMA modules
are moving to SIM cards

\- SIM cards are safer, as initial CDMA systems that fell back to AMPS were
vulnerable to cloning

"I wouldn’t have to go to a shop to buy SIM card and I wouldn’t have to go
back to the same shop to top-up my SIM card."

And that's why a lot of stores sell (or you know, they just give you) SIM
cards and an even bigger amount of stores have top-ups available.

And of course the "proposed solution" relies on login/password which is such a
bad taste joke I don't even find funny. A SIM card is a hardware crypto auth
module, if there's one thing that deserves to be called "stupid technology of
the past century" are usernames and passwords.

Sure, phone numbers are old. It's an old standard that has a big backwards
compatibility requirement.

~~~
vviktor
"It was never as difficult as portrayed" \- we are talking about UX here.
Stating that something is not as difficult is wrong. The UX is bad. When you
go to a new country for the first time, you need to search online or ask
around how and where to buy sim card. Yes, you can do it in a lot of countries
in almost any grocery store. I'm not saying it's easy and it's close to
impossible to have something like this implemented world wide. I'm proposing
what I think would be ideal solution.

Login/password is the current de-facto standard. Until something better,
widely accepted comes along, I don't see why my phone number should be safer
than my facebook account or my bank account (it's not username/password, but
the security of cards that we use for payment is pretty bad)

~~~
raverbashing
> we are talking about UX here. Stating that something is not as difficult is
> wrong.

As an UX concept, correct. But UX cannot go against technological limitations,
physical reality or security

> When you go to a new country for the first time, you need to search online
> or ask around how and where to buy sim card

Go walk in the city center maybe? Ask around?

Yes, you usually need to do some research if you want the best price, but that
goes for _most things_ . Also a lot of electronics stores can give you the
different plans as they have sim cards.

Asking around and doing price research is part of being an adult, sellers
won't come together to offer you a price and plan comparison in one page.

You're also assuming that people will want to change their mobile operator
when they get to a different country (for a short trip they won't need it,
some will need to keep their original phone working)

Now, remote SIM provisioning may be a good option for some devices (not all of
them have wifi or are a smartphone), but that's much different from having a
user/pwd combination

> Login/password is the current de-facto standard.

Until people start having their cell phones cloned, which _already happened_
and that's why they came up with something better

> Until something better, widely accepted comes along

It's called SIM card, and it is widely accepted, since most carriers went for
GSM worldwide
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_standards#Development_of_the_Market_Share_of_Mobile_Standards)

------
Johnny555
If you want a stable phone number, use Google Voice (or another VOIP
equivalent).

When I travel to Europe/Asia, I just buy a local SIM and use Google Hangouts
to make and receive calls over IP. I treat my cell phone numbers as
disposable, and indeed,I've been through 4 different prepaid carriers in the
past few years, but none of my friends and family noticed any change since
they all call via my GV number. (well, in reality, almost no one calls these
days except my parents, everyone else SMS's... I don't even answer the phone
if it's not from one of my contacts since 95% of the time it's a telemarketer,
and if it's not, they can leave me a message and Google will transcribe it)

~~~
scrollaway
What other VOIP equivalents are there for those of us who don't live in the
US?

~~~
Johnny555
I have a second number from Anveo.com that I can forward to any number in the
world. They have voice mail and smart call flow routing so you can do things
like forward unanswered calls to another number, set up a mini IVR system
(i.e. "Press '1' to call me on my mobile", "Press '2' to call my mom", etc.).
They do SMS forwarding for some countries, as well as web based SMS.

They also have a nice service that lets you purchase a number in a foreign
country and forward it to your own number. My relatives live overseas so I
bought a local number in their country that they can use to call me for free.
it only costs me a few dollars/month.

None of these features are unique to Anveo, but I've been using them for a few
years and have been quite happy with the service.

------
c22
I don't understand the problem, isn't this "solved" by contact lists? I for
one am glad I can just call "Ted" instead of having to remember some nonsense
like dreamyted887.com

I agree phone numbers are stupid to use as authentication, but I don't see how
this scheme can save anyone from having to purchase a new sim when they move
between autonomous cell regions.

Also, why is the Patrick McGoohan quote attributed to Iron Maiden?

~~~
mig39
The author doesn't realize that Iron Maiden themselves are quoting "The
Prisoner" in their song "The Prisoner."

~~~
vviktor
Thanks! Didn't know it was from an actual tv show. I updated the quote
reference.

------
grkvlt
Doesn't this exist already? It's called DNS, along with E.164 representation
of numbers.[0] You can map a telephone number to its E.164 representation by
reversing it, so +447123456789 would become 9.8.7.6.5.4.3.2.1.7.4.4.e164.arpa
and delegation at various points in the hierarchy would be done by the
responsible PTO or telco, so that looking up the number would map to a SIP or
similar identifier. Alternatively, looking up a DNS name could return a record
with the E.164 address as a CNAME or similar, to provide the name to number
mapping. I don't think this is really very widely implemented, except maybe
for some VOIP providers, but since 4G UMTS is IP based maybe it could become
more useful?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164#DNS_mapping_of_E.164_num...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164#DNS_mapping_of_E.164_numbers)

------
darklajid
I agree that phone numbers feel archaic & stupid. I also think they are stupid
identifiers for services other than telephone networks (say .. IM).

------
Johnny555
_Now imagine crossing the border, connecting to a new telco and being prompted
to choose a data plan (or a phone number). This would be great! I’d purchase
new phone number / data plan every time I’d cross the border. Telcos would
profit from this and I wouldn’t have to spend time researching the best
package (I will be presented with the options right in the popup on my phone)_

The author has a very optimistic view of cellular companies -- in many
countries, the official carrier rates for SIM's are far worse than those
available from resellers, so the "Click here to roam" rates are not likely to
be the "best options"

If telcos really wanted to give fair rates to roaming customers, they'd just
negotiate more reasonable roaming rates so visitors wouldn't feel the need to
buy a local SIM in the first place.

~~~
grkvlt
> in 2016, roaming rates were still quite high in Europe

Actually, European roaming is incredibly reasonable, and set to get even
better.

Since July 2014 roaming charges were set to EUR 0.05 per minute, and since
April this year that was changed to a cap, with prices varying from the
domestic rate to EUR 0.05 maximum. And the legislation [0] requires the telcos
to make changes again next year in 2017, that will make roaming charges
_equivalent_ to domestic charges, i.e. abolishing them. Similar rules apply to
data rates - between domestic rate and EUR 0.05 per MiB just now and no extra
charge above domestic in 2017.

[0] [https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/roaming-
tariff...](https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/roaming-tariffs)

------
doctorshady
That's like saying IP addresses are stupid technology of the past century.

~~~
runeks
They are. Nodes on the internet should be identified by public key hashes, not
IPs. Whoever can respond to a packet with a message, whose signature verifies
against the public key that it's destined to, is by definition the recipient.

Servers would have relatively static keys, while client keys could be as
ephemeral as wanted. So rather than specify an IP address (location) as
destination, you specify the recipient, by encrypting a request with eg.
Google's SSL public key, signing it with your public key, and delivering it to
something that will route this packet to Google (at whatever IP address that
may be), so they can decrypt it, and produce a packet encrypted with your
public key.

~~~
jrockway
IP addresses have nothing to do with identification. As the name implies,
they're for addressing.

~~~
runeks
My point is that, with cryptography, they are redundant. If all traffic on the
internet is encrypted, why do I need to both encrypt a packet such that only a
single recipient can read it _and_ specify an address? Any node on the path to
the recipient could do a lookup and find Google's IP address, the client
doesn't really need to.

~~~
jrockway
I don't understand how your system would work with any sort of reasonable
performance. How do upstream routers know which network to forward your packet
to? The reason BGP works is because address spaces are delegated to
"autonomous systems". The authority over the address space delegated to an
autonomous system doesn't change very often, therefore only systems close to a
packet's destination need to be updated with respect to routing changes on a
regular basis. Systems farther away have a basic and infrequently-changing
idea of how to interact with that ASN, i.e. your ISP doesn't really care what
Google's network is doing, it knows how to get your packet closer to Google,
and that's all. As the packet gets closer to the destination, those systems
know more about Google and less about your ISP. Thus, we have an actual
distributed system' the information each network needs to store and maintain
is limited, but there is still much flexibility allowing the network to self-
repair damage.

Certainly, networks can work without any delegation in this form; tor's hidden
services show that this can work in practice. Pretty slow though. Reasonable
performance (and accuracy) depends on not having every node on every network
know the correct route to every other node, or having nodes have to reach a
consensus (slow) on where to forward your packet at each hop. What's your plan
for that?

------
relics443
I agree with the author on a few points:

1\. the telephone number system is terrible (but only in hindsight) 2\. a
telephone number should not be used for security

But his premise of a DNS for phone numbers is ridiculous. Does he think the
PSTN was invented when smartphones came out? What about the wide plethora of
legacy phones that would cause countless issues?

If someone did manage to complete he herculean (if not impossible) task of
making it happen, it would be a massive waste; the PSTN will become obsolete
in the not so distant future as internet based solutions take over.

~~~
nkw
> But his premise of a DNS for phone numbers is ridiculous.

[http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/enum/](http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/enum/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping)

------
kowdermeister
He could just set up a subdomain called "tel.namename.com" and put a link
there pointing to tel:+3030303030

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vlokshin
interesting observation: P1 of HN, but only 1 recommend on Medium.

Interesting network to network phenomenon or "growth engineering?" ;)

------
agumonkey
I prefer them.

