World's first Virtual Country Code

Yesterday Voxbone launched "iNum" the internet's first Global Country Code. Traditionally numbering plans had been alloted geographically and this had worked fine till the concept of portability emerged in US in 1996 when the first movement towards binding the number to the subscriber rather than geography/service/provider occured.

Voxbone has extended this portability concept to the global level with a "glocal"country code. The series used is the ITU series +883 for International Networks.

The key to the popularity of this service will be the cost incurred byPSTN customers to call these numbers.The cost of terminating to the iNum series needs to be lesser than termination charges for most countries in the world which is not the case as of now. Carriers supporting calls to +883 charge more than a dollar as of now. Add to this the retail margin and calls will be prohibitvely expensive.

Even if Voxbone Carrier partners carry calls to iNum numbers for free it will remain a challenge getting the code series opened across retail networks without an established revenue model.