White Pages & 411
Why isn’t my number appearing in the White Pages?
BACKGROUND: The white pages are simply a print out of the phone company’s (telco’s) 411 database at the time the book goes to print. Because directory assistance service is one of the areas in which phone companies are cutting corners in order to reduce their costs and offer more competitive rates, white pages errors and omissions are occurring with increasing frequency, and, we predict, will become even worse in the future. It seems like this should be a simple problem to fix, but:
• now, problems can originate from many sources, and locating them—not to mention fixing them—is unfortunately sometimes impossible.
• white pages content is highly regulated by the utility telcos (yellow pages content is generally not), and in some cases, some of these regulatory issues may override anyone's ability to control the content of 411/white page databases.
TROUBLESHOOTING: Here are the most likely causes for a number not to appear in the White Pages, listed in order of increasing difficulty to correct.
1) Information is listed incorrectly in the local utility publisher’s directory. 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.), which often works closely with the local utility directory publisher.
2) Some smaller telcos simply have different procedures for listing a number in the local utility publishers’ directory or cannot list a non-local number in the local utility publishers’ directory.
In working with a number of very small, rural “mom and pop” phone companies, we have found that getting a number into 411 and into the white pages are sometimes actually two separate requests.
3) Information is listed correctly in the local utility publisher’s directory but incorrectly or not at all in an independent publisher’s directory (Valley Yellow Pages, Yellow Book, etc.). Problems cannot only arise 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 publishers’ 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. In these cases, you must deal with the independent publisher. Please be advised that some independent phone directories will not automatically pick up the listings that appear in the utility publishers’ directories, or there may be a delay in doing so.
4) 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 publisher. In this case, only the reseller 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.
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