Re: Getting A New Verizon Number In Extended Network

Quick wrote:


What? "regional by computer system"?  What in the world
does that mean? A current, SPECIFIC, example would do.


Apparently you don't know the history of Verizon.

Once upon a time, there two companies, called Bell Atlantic and GTE. GTE wanted to have Bell Altantic's babies. Therefore, a merger was proposed, and the two took on the surname of Verizon.

As part of this deal, the stepchildren of the family - Bell Atlantic Mobile, GTE MobileNet, Primeco Wireless and Airtouch Cellular - were to be smooshed together in a large compactor and formed into one big FrankenChild. A very British Daddy Warbucks by the name of Vodaphone was brought into the picture to help finance this meshing, and thus, what we now know as Verizon Wireless was born... err, created.

Much like any FrankenChild though, this one had problems. At least four diferent billing and accounting systems were in use, compounded further by the fact that this child had a varacious appetite and loved to continually gobble up other smaller cell companies. Those billing systems have been gradually assimilated as time has passed, but even to this day, the system is fractured by region. Much of the old Bell Atlantic system (particualry the Northeast) still uses an old, archaic billing system known as I2K. The rest of the network uses a system called (ironically enough) Vision.

The end result is that the legacy of the stepchildren still haunt you if you are unlucky enough to have to move between an area served by one billing system, to an area served by another. While the two systems can be forced to do what is minimially required of them to make the whole network appear to be one big happy family, the dysfunctions become very apparent when accounts must be transferred or other cross-network changes mst be made.




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