What is a mobile number? Contrary to popular belief, it is not just +447x, as you have to omit personal numbers (long story,) which are +4470 and radiopaging (yep, still a thing – probably just the NHS… but they did get rid of fax, apparently – baby steps!) which is +4476.
That leaves +4471-75, +4477+79. Per the UK’s National Telephone Numbering Plan, they are so-called “Mobile Services”.
The definition of which is a service capable of being used in motion, over wireless telegraphy. I’ll save you digging around for the legal definition in various bits of legislation, but that means electromagnetic energy with a frequency under 3THz.
So when we see mobile service numbers exhibiting call centre or nuisance call behaviour, eyebrows get raised.
What do we have? A call centre on a Boeing 747 with SIP over Starlink? A room full of plumbers that have cloned their phones for an outbound campaign? A portacabin office on the back of a lowloader, driving around, with a bunch of people accessing a cloud PBX over a MiFi device?
Of course, “capable of being used in motion” is a very broad term, but given the age of the definition, Ofcom’s original intent can be inferred – nuances about DECT phones and bluetooth headsets are probably not going to wash at Riverside House.
Where we have suballocated these numbers and our nuisance call algorithm is triggered at a given threshold, we now send an automated ticket to our customer, enquiring about the use case. If you receive one of these, pay attention to it.
There is not, to our knowledge, a lot of quantitative data about the psychology behind answering unknown callers presenting a mobile number, but there is a lot of qualitative data that suggests the number types are more likely to be engaged with over non-geographic or geographic equivalents. Or, to put it another way, more prized by scrotes involved in scrotitude.
With that in mind, we would suggest you take extra care onwardly sub-allocating Simwood Mobile Numbers.
