The 411 on Directory Assistance

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The 411 on Directory Assistance
Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 04:18:15 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
To: undisclosed-recipient:;


The 411 on Directory Assistance

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
The New York Times
March 9, 2006

Calling 411 for directory assistance can be maddeningly expensive.
Carriers like Sprint and Verizon charge more than $1 and sometimes as
much as $2 a call from a cellphone..

And much of that is profit. Directory assistance "truly is a cash
cow," said Saroja Girishankar, a vice president at the Pelorus Group,
a telecommunications market research firm based in Raritan, N.J. She
and other industry analysts said that the carriers paid wholesalers -
who actually provide the 411 service - from 25 to 50 cents a call.

Naturally, the wireless carriers and directory assistance companies
want to keep the cash cow in their barn. But increasingly, customers
have access to free alternatives to 411. And as cellphones become
more sophisticated, the options for avoiding paid directory
assistance are multiplying.

Already, two new services - 800-FREE-411 and 800-411-METRO - offer
directory assistance free of charge, though users have to listen to
advertisements.

Other companies, including Google, offer free directory assistance
via text message. Soon, voice-activated search engines may make it
possible to bypass directory assistance entirely. One contender, the
Maestro system, a voice-activated search engine being developed at
Ben-Gurion University in Israel, will allow users to surf the Web
just by speaking and listening.

To keep users calling their paid 411 services, the major wireless
carriers have added features like horoscopes, sports scores and stock
prices. As cellular bandwidth increases, those offerings will go from
voice to text to multimedia, said Tom Moran, executive director of
product management and development for Verizon LiveSource.
(LiveSource, owned by Verizon Communications, handles about 1 billion
411 calls a year for customers not only of Verizon Wireless, but of
T-Mobile, Cingular and Alltel.)

...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/business/09cell.html?ex=1299560400&en=51a40b3b3f749c77&ei=5090



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