On Thu, 2007-10-04 at 20:06 +0100, peter green wrote:
> On the other hand it strongly discourages marketing calls and other 
> timewasting calls to mobiles (yes I know the US has a law against 
> marketing calls to mobiles but from what I can gather it is widely 
> ignored, also in the US you can't even tell from the number if you are 
> calling a mobile).


Actually you can tell (to a point), if you have the right contacts.

The prefixes for cell phones are always different from landlines since
cell phone providers buy up prefixes in blocks. The general person can't
tell, but phone providers certainly can.

Aside from that, if you see alot of phone number prefixes in your area
you can make educated guesses. In my case I used to be able to pretty
accurately guess whether a 416 number was landline or not (heck, at one
point I could tell a person the rough geographical area their landline
was located in!).

Please note though that number portability completely hoses this, in my
area at least you can now reassign a landline number to a mobile, so
eventually no matter how familiar you are with the prefixes in your area
code you're odds are bad... :)

As for telemarketers you are completely correct. I've received tons of
telemarketing calls on my landline (although technically it's not a
landline anymore, switched to VOIP, moved to a different area code, but
kept the same phone number...), but to this date can't recall a single
telemarketing call on either of my mobiles.

TTYL

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