White Pages & 411
Why isn’t my number coming up in 411/Directory Assistance?
BACKGROUND: This problem is occurring with increasing frequency and we predict will become even worse in the future because 411/directory assistance service is one of the areas in which phone companies (telcos) are cutting corners in order to reduce their costs and offer more competitive rates. It seems like this should be a simple problem to fix, and it used to be, in the days before phone company deregulation. Now, problems can originate from many sources, and locating them—not to mention fixing them—is unfortunately sometimes impossible.
TROUBLESHOOTING: Here are the most likely causes for a number not coming up in 411, listed in order of increasing difficulty to correct:
1) Information is listed incorrectly with the local utility telco. In most cases, this can easily be corrected by working directly with the local utility telco (AT&T in most of California, Qwest in most of the Pacific Northwest, etc.).
2) Local phone service for the number involved has been switched from the local utility telco to an independent reseller or other phone company (CLEC), and the reseller has listed the information incorrectly with the local utility telco. In this case, only the independent company can fix the problem and, in our experience, this can be very difficult to get them to do. This applies to large reputable companies like AT&T (providing phone service in an area where it is not the utility telco) as well as small local competitors. Customers usually make these switches in order to reduce their phone bills, but, in our experience, most of them ultimately conclude that the cost reduction is smaller than anticipated and the service problems are not worth the savings, and they eventually switch back. Please see our article on CLEC phone service issues.
3) Information is listed correctly with the local utility telco, regardless of who controls the phone service, but appears incorrectly in some other database (other telco’s 411, online directory, etc.). Problems can arise not only from the 411 database of the utility telco for the number in question but from any other database that pulls from that utility telco's database. That is, even if there is no problem on the local utility telco's end, there could be a problem with the way other databases are pulling a particular bit of information from the local utility telco’s 411. This is analogous to your name or address being wrong on a mailing list, which is, in turn, duplicated many times. While it is sometimes impossible to determine the source of the error, the source of the problem must be identified in order for it to be corrected, and even then it can take time for the correction to ‘trickle down’. Other telcos will pull from the local utility’s 411 at varying intervals—sometimes days, weeks, or even months—so even if a problem has been corrected at the source, it's impossible to determine how long that information will take to filter down to other telcos' 411 databases (under normal “non-CLEC” circumstances, changes are reflected in 411 within several days).
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