Please Hold: Wireless 411

[TNDan21]

Please Hold: Wireless 411
By Joanna Glasner| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Apr, 18, 2006

An ambitious plan to build a national cell-phone directory looks increasingly like a wrong number.

While no one has officially killed the 2-year-old project to create a "wireless 411" service, the effort, originally expected to roll out last year, is not moving forward. There's still no planned launch date and apparently little public demand for the service.

"It's not dead, but it's not alive," said Patrick Cox, CEO of Qsent, the company hired to manage the 411 data by a working group that includes most of the largest U.S. cell-phone carriers. "We're sort of in this holding pattern."

Initially touted as a service for wireless customers who wanted to give friends, family and colleagues a way to find their numbers, the 411 project drew fire early on from consumer- and privacy-rights advocates, who worried that an improperly managed service could expose numbers to telemarketers and shatter mobile users' expectations of privacy.

"Because these devices are so personal, people want to control who gets ahold of their numbers," said Keith Mallinson, wireless analyst at research firm Yankee Group.

According to Cox, directory planners have taken measures to address all privacy concerns: Only people who choose to participate would be listed, data could be removed at any time and numbers would be available only through an operator, never online or in print.

Even so, carriers aren't eager to roll out wireless 411. Representatives from Cingular and Sprint -- two of the project's original backers, along with T-Mobile USA and Alltell -- said no plans have been announced to move forward with the service.

Even with protections in place, privacy concerns remain pertinent as more people depend on wireless phones for their primary communications devices.

Today, Yankee Group estimates that about 10 percent of all U.S. phone users, and more than 20 percent of young adults, have no land line. Those who have both a land line and a cell phone, meanwhile, make a growing share of their calls wirelessly.

Qsent's Cox argues that a directory is even more relevant with this "wireless substitution" on the rise.

"It's the largest network of its kind in the world without a directory," he said of the mobile-phone system. "It doesn't allow people to connect."

A survey commissioned around the inception of the 411 project revealed public support for a directory. Research firm Pierz Group found that 53 percent of mobile users surveyed would want their numbers in a directory, provided strict privacy protections were in place.

Still, Yankee Group's Mallinson said he's not aware of any successful mobile directory efforts outside the United States. And while it is possible, for a fee, to list a wireless number in most traditional phone directories, few people do so.

Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, sees the interminable delay in the 411 project as vindication for the company's early and continued opposition to the project.

"It's a really bad idea," said Verizon spokesman Jeff Nelson. "The zone of privacy that's unique to wireless would just be torn up."

http://www.wired.com/news/technology...?tw=wn_index_3

[Fathead]

What a waste of energy.

[Fire14]

It is good to hear someone is starting to realize this was a bad idea & not many people would go for it.
I think if carriers went with a traditional landline style billing with unlimited mins, then they would end up going with a directory, till then it makes little sense.