drewssongs@gmail.com wrote:
> You probably have been migrated to the new billing system. With the
> old billing system, we had to create new account with the desired
> name, move the number in question to that new account, then move it
> back. With the NEW billing system, we simply type the desired name in
> a field and *bam*, less than 72 hrs later, you're new CID displays.
>
15 years ago when I worked for what was then one of the largest cellular
billing bureas in the country we had fields in the DB to assign a
discrete alpha label to each number in the system. CID was not yet a
widespread creature and it hadn't yet been implemented by any cellular
carrier to the best of my recollection - but we had the fields and any
CSR at the carrier could touch a record and change that field. The
carriers found the field useful for a variety of reasons, as did the
cellular users, especially those with combo bills that aggregated tens
or hundreds of individual phones into one single statement. "Bill Jones
Emp54" was a lot easier for a lot of people to find than a straight
numeric when a "statement" might consist of tens of thousands of paper
pages.
In the bad old days of mainframe processing both we (the processor)
maintained the carrier databases. Carriers had available on their
systems a static shot of the DB. Changes a CSR entered were stored in
registers and dumped to computer tapes which were shipped to us (the
processor) for merging into the DB. Once the merge was done we'd cut a
fresh DB copy and ship it back to the customer (carrier) on yet more
computer tape.
So back then it did indeed take three, sometimes four working days
MINIMUM for account changes to be reflected in the database. But
really, there's no reason for such changes to take more than 12 hours -
and that's a generous whack of time - thanks to client-server DB apps.
Update on customer non-service
Linear Mode
