Industry Indicators

The FCC is changing how phone numbers are allocated to service providers, which will essentially make reverse billing obsolete and increase the cost to customers using landline phones to call some cell phones. Reverse billing has allowed wireless carriers to reimburse wireline carriers for the costs associated with toll calls from landline to cell phones.

This change could mean that some calls previously considered local will incur per-minute toll charges. That is because area codes are assigned rate centers with their own number prefixes. Calls made to nearby rate centers are local calls. Calls made to rate centers farther away increase in cost with distance and are considered intrastate or long-distance calls. Cell phones can be divided into a number of rate centers in the same area, which will make some seemingly local calls non-local.

The new number allocation process will make it impractical to figure out which calls would fall under reverse billing. Depending on how many cell phones customers call from their traditional phones and the number of calls they make, the increased cost to them could range from a few cents to upward of $20.