Telepocalypse

To whom may I direct this call?

Don’t usually write about work, but I don’t think I’ll be giving any deep corporate secrets away with this one. It’s just a little parable of the cell phone and the smart network.

People who have both cellular and local telephone service need to be put through to a different call center from people with just cellular service. This is because normal cellular care agents can’t deal with local telephone service issues.

But the project for combined service means upgrading the intelligent routing software in customer care to send the calls to the right place. Every inbound call needs intelligent routing. This will take time and money.

The easy way round this would be to re-provision selected customers’ cellphones so that the short code for calling cellular customer care pointed at the combined care center. Except you can’t do that because the end points are dumb and the routing of short codes is done in the network, which in turn has no idea whether you have local service as well as cellular.

So the smart network and smart call center routing system conspire to prevent what would be a trivial one-off routing change if done at the edge of the network.

(There is also currently no way of remotely re-provisioning handsets this way, although there are standards in the offing to do it. But the existence of legacy dumb devices that need a smart network leaves you stuck in the high-cost smart network world forever and a day.)

The moral: start with smart edges and a dumb center and you’re better off. And if you start the other wrong way round, you’ll never make the transition because the embedded base of dumb edge devices imposes an impossible switching cost (if you’ll excuse the pun).