Local Number Portability

Cboulanger (Talk | contribs)
(Created page with "== Local Number Portability (LNP) == Since the beginning of modern telephony, the phone number has been composed of series of digits representing the address of the final des...")
Newer edit →

---

Local Number Portability (LNP)

Since the beginning of modern telephony, the phone number has been composed of series of digits representing the address of the final destination (i.e. the callee). This is actually what the end-user believed actually. But in reality, the signification of these digits has changed over the decades sometimes partially representing the actual route from one switch to the other or the rural region where the callee actually lives.

Traditionally, every switches was assigned an NPA-NXX (where NPA means "Numbering Plan Area"), meaning that a phone number with the format NPA-NXX-XXXX was actually refering to a specific geographical switch. As the number of end-user was growing in geographical regions, the set of available numbers in a specific NPA-NXX-XXXX was reducing forcing the telecommunication authorities to allocate more regional codes. At some point, the switches themselves were provisioned at their maximum capacity which forces the operators to include other switches not necessarily to the same geographical locations thus making the NPA-NXX less and less relevant to geography. However, the real changes came when the normative authorities decided that a end-user has the right to keep his assigned phone number regardless of which carrier he's chose as long as it kept to the same local geographical region. This change had to be supported by the ISUP switching/terminating equipment to decouple the actual phone number from the carrier/switching equipment and link it to the end-user. However, for routing purposes, these equipments still needed a way to deduce the routing to reach that end-customer number. This mechanism is referred to as "Local Number Portability" (LNP).

With LNP now active, a new number called the LRN (Location routing number) is introduced in the routing mechanism. It is formatted as NPA-NXX-XXXX and points logically to a particular switching equipment: it is the switch permanent address. The DNIS (end-user called number) is now a “virtual number” that only the last end-switch knows how to route to the subscriber. It is the role of the originating switch and intermediate switches to translate the DNIS into an LRN (consulting a regional databases using SS7 or SIP) and route the call to the switch responsible for that subscriber. THEN (and only then), the last switch uses the original DNIS to route it to the end-user.

When the first subscriber within an NPA-NXX changes service providers, the entire NPA-NXX is considered “ported,” which means that this particular NPA-NXX combination has become a portable number and no longer represents a specific exchange. Every call to that NPA-NXX must now determine the LRN of the number that is being called