The topic of how and if a wireless telephone number directory should be established has been and continues to be heavily debated, but so far little has been said about the organization that is charged with making it happen.
At the recent CTIA show I had a chance to sit down with David Eastman, the marketing communications director at Qsent, a Portland-based contact information validation provider selected as the data aggregator for a nationwide directory service. The company plans to launch nationwide wireless 411 service sometime in 2006 with participation expected from Alltel, Cingular, Nextel, Sprint PCS and T-Mobile USA. Verizon has said it will not provide access to its customer base due to privacy concerns.
Eastman explained how Qsent got the job: “Qsent competed in an RFP process with about 27 companies who currently provide data for DA services and also other leading data services providers. Qsent was selected because of its experience managing contact information, its public commitment to privacy, its new technology model for a wireless 411 service that is based upon a free, choice, privacy-protected database, and the fact we were not part of the current landline DA infrastructure.”
Qsent will aggregate and host the privacy-protected opt-in information service. Customers will have to opt-in through their carrier in order to be included. The company said there will be no printed directory or Internet access to the database. Single numbers will be retrievable only via voice query over the telephone. If the requested number is available in the database, it will be retrieved for that one transaction and then returned to the security of the database.
The company is privately held, funded through venture capital and not financially supported by CTIA or any participating carrier.
“Carriers and their associated operator service centers (411 operator centers) share in revenue from 411 calls. There will be no fees to the wireless subscriber being called-who chose to be in the directory-other than normal minutes as with any phone call. The person making the inquiry-just like landline-will incur a DA call fee. There is no fee to the wireless subscriber to be in the privacy-protected database, no fee to change information and no fee to leave,” said Eastman.
Choice and privacy. The words were repeated over and over in the conversation.
Carrier trepidation about the wireless directory is understandable, but in the era of consumer rights and with a growing percentage of consumers relying on wireless service as their primary telephone for both business and personal use, doesn’t it make sense for each consumer to decide themselves what’s best for them? Wasn’t one of the overall themes of CTIA about serving the wants and needs of the individual wireless user?
