Coming to Terms with the Toll-Free Life Cycle

Toll-free numbers can be an immense source of frustration if you do not know where they are in their life. Here are just a few of the scenarios that you could be dealing with in regard to toll-free telephone service:

You reserve a number and fail to use it during the time it is in reserved status, thereby losing access to the number, and enabling it to fall back to the rest of the world. Keep reading.
You want to use a toll-free number has been cancelled and released to the world the same day. This is not good. Very bad things can happen. The following sections are for you.
You already have toll-free numbers and don’t plan on canceling them, but are changing carriers. If you fit this scenario, you should jump over to Chapter 9 to find out about ordering toll-free numbers. You face specific pitfalls in that task that you need to know about now.
If you’re not moving your numbers, but they’re just not working for one reason or another, Chapter 14 is your destination.
Finally, if you are planning on ordering new toll-free numbers or canceling old numbers, you are in the right place.

Conception

In the beginning, thousands of toll-free numbers wander spare around the national SMS database. As long as they are spare, anyone can decide to secure them by placing them in a reserved status. Now the reserved status isn’t forever; actually, it only lasts 45 days. If your carrier doesn’t activate the number before the 45th day, the toll-free number is released back into the spare pool and it becomes free game for anyone else. The good news is that for the 45 days the number is in reserved status, no other carrier can touch it in any way. No one can attempt to migrate the number away either through the usual channels or by force. The number simply exists in limbo until you activate it or let it go.

Warning! If you are ordering new toll-free numbers, don’t be in a hurry to publish them. The reality is that we live in an imperfect world, and sometimes people transpose digits, advertising your number instead of theirs. Or maybe you wrote down the wrong number? (Never!) A frazzled business owner may have forgotten that a number that he reserved 45 days ago (and is currently printing
a million business cards to promote) has moved back to the spare pool and
(oh, horror) been picked up by you. Or maybe it was you who thought you took that number out of reserve? (Never!) In either case, the toll-free numbers you believe in your heart are yours may not be there (or you may decide you don’t want them). Many people believe that the second they receive a
fax about their new number they have received a guarantee of the number’s availability, but that is not true. A number isn’t yours until you can receive calls from it. Never publish a toll-free number until you have activated it, made a test call to it, and ensured that it rings through to the correct number! I cannot stress this point enough.

Birth

After your carrier finds your favorite toll-free number, you have to activate it. This is usually an easy task for your carrier and if the toll-free number is going to ring into a typical, everyday phone line, the process should take no more than about 24 hours. During that time frame, your carrier simply updates the national SMS database so that every carrier in the U.S. knows how to route the call. Anyone in the order-entry or provisioning department at your carrier can send the order off through an automated system to the national SMS database.

When your carrier updates the national database, it also updates its network to route the call to your home, office, cellphone, or wherever else you requested that the calls be sent. When all the systems are updated, presto! You can receive calls.

Adulthood

After a toll-free number is active, it goes to work. During this time, you can move the number to another carrier, point it to another location, or make any variety of adds, changes, or moves on it. Toll-free numbers don’t wear down or become brittle with age; they just keep on working as long as you do. Only when a company goes out of business or is significantly reorganized, nullifying the number’s purpose in life, is a toll-free number deactivated.

Demise

There is a standard procedure in the industry for decommissioning a toll-free number, and the next person who picks up the toll-free number would like you to follow it. When you shut down a toll-free number give it a proper burial by blocking the number and then canceling it.

Your toll-free number can bypass the three-month hold time for a cancel order and be immediately released into the spare pool. If your carrier issues a cancel order on your toll-free numbers and does not block it for three months first, very bad things can happen:

Gone is gone! If you send the order to your carrier to take down the wrong toll-free number and the number becomes born again immediately, you may have no logistical or legal way to get it back.

Remember When you give up a number, it’s gone forever. If someone else picks the number and it sits in protective reserve limbo for 45 days before activation, you can’t try to break the reserve and migrate the number back to your company. The other company legally acquired the number. Your only hope of reclaiming the number in this case is through diplomatic negotiation with its new owner.
Chaos ensues! If you just want to be rid of a number and release it without following the protocol, you’re potentially setting a stable world on a path to destruction. The system works because everyone plays by the same rules. When rules are broken, the whole telecommunications universe falls apart. Okay, I may be overstating things just a tad, but the point is that with toll-free numbers, patience is essential.

If, for any reason, you’re done with a toll-free number, you must follow a pretty standard procedure. Give it a proper goodbye now so that it can be reborn later. Here’s how the process should work:

You contact your carrier with an order to take down a toll-free number.
The carrier places a block on the number.

Placing a block on a toll-free number simply prevents calls from completing to it.
Your carrier still has total control of the number for the 90 days the number stays in blocked status.

Aside for ensuring that the block order shifts to a cancel order (see Step
4), for all intents and purposes, you’re done.

Remember This is an important step, because if you sent the wrong number to be taken down by your carrier or you changed your mind for some other reason, you can still have it reactivated quickly and easily during that 90-day window.
After 90 days the block order automatically turns into a cancel order.
The toll-free number sits in a cancel status for another 90 days.
After these 90 days in limbo, it is reborn, becoming spare again. It’s released for someone else to reserve and activate.

The intention of this process is to give you three months to find your mistake if you cancelled the wrong number, as well as to allow a six-month cool-down before someone else can activate it. During that time, the people who have been calling the number for four years will realize that the number is out of service and will stop calling.

Remember Following this professional courtesy prevents the next business that reserves the number from receiving wrong-number calls from people who wanted to speak to representatives of your business. Obviously, this is the protocol you hope the previous owner of your toll-free number followed, so be sure that you follow the golden rule.