Advantages and Disadvantages of Having A National Cell Phone DirectoryKeeping a centralized national cell phone number directory would have been nice. It would be great to have access to a list of everyone’s cell phone numbers. However , there will be a lot of issues to be settled before having one.
Cellphones are now a necessity equipment. Even the very poor have at least one cellphone in the household. Would you think it would be nice to have one national cell phone directory? Everyone who has a cellphone would have an entry on it. Their name and cellphone number plus their permanent address could be inputted there.
There are a lot of advantages of having a national cell phone directory. Here are some:
1. You can check someone’s cellphone number anytime
If you lost someone’s contact number for whatever reason (lost phone, deleted phonebook entry accidentally) you have the directory as reference. If you’ve accidentally deleted all your contacts it would be tedious to bombard all your social networks to ask your friends to send in their numbers again.
2. You don’t have to update everyone every time you change your number
Nowadays, when you change your number, you have to send your new number via SMS to everyone in your phonebook, post it in every social network you have and email it to all your mailing lists. You also have to update all the banks you have an account with, all your organizations and other affiliations plus the database of your school or your company. Having a national cell phone directory reduces the updates that you have to do. You can just update the national cell phone directory and have your friends know that you changed your number.
3. Centralized National Cell phone Directory
A lot of expenses of different organizations come from managing databases on employee or member profile. Having a National Cell phone Directory may eliminate a list of information that takes up space. Updates regarding the information of the entries in the national cell phone directory can be accessed anytime.
Yes, it would have been nice to have a national cell phone directory accessible by everyone. But before it could be done, there will be a lot of issues that need to be settled:
1. Number of cellphone subscribers in one country
The smallest of countries today have millions of citizens. The biggest of the countries would have billions. Keeping a database of every citizen’s number would require a lot of resources-database, labor, and costs.
2. Size of the Hardcopy
Having a national landline number directory is possible. There is actually one in some countries: It is a hardcopy that is produced annually.
But producing a hardcopy of national cell phone directory is a different issue. As mentioned earlier, there are more than one cell phone in every household. Some people even have multiple units. Therefore, this national cell phone directory would be at least 5x thicker, bulkier, and heavier than any regular national landline directory.
There will also be an issue of the number of copies to be reproduced. Will there be one harcopy per subscriber? That would have millions of hardcopies every release.
Maintaining an online national cell phone directory would be better. It would be cheaper, easier to maintain and update.
3. Frequency of Updates
A lot of people change cell phone numbers very frequently for various reasons. It would require a good system to manage these updates.
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