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In the North American Numbering Plan, a RespOrg (a contraction for responsible organization) is a company which maintains the registration for individual toll-free telephone numbers in the distributed Service Management System/800 database. Their function in North American telephony is analogous to that of an individual registrar in the Internet's Domain Name System. RespOrgs were established in 1993 as part of a Federal Communications Commission order instituting toll-free number portability. A RespOrg (pronounced as though it were a single word, something like ''"ressborg"'') can be a long distance company, reseller, end user or an independent that offers an outsourced service. ==Theory of operation== The initial implementation of toll-free calling was primitive. In the 1950s, a collect call or a call to a Zenith number had to be completed manually by a telephone operator; by 1967, a direct-dial +1-800 number could be provided using Wide Area Telephone Service, but each prefix was tied to a specific geographic destination and each number brought in on special fixed-rate trunks which were priced beyond the reach of most small businesses. There was no means to select between rival carriers and little room for vanity numbering; a subscriber would need three separate numbers to be reachable from Canada, US interstate and US intrastate. A "Data base communication call processing method"〔http://www.google.com/patents/US4191860〕 patented by Roy P. Weber of Bell Labs (and implemented by AT&T in 1982) broke the link between individual numbers and a specific trunk, city or carrier. A toll-free number was merely an index into a large, distributed database; any number could geographically be reassigned anywhere merely by changing its database record or sent to one of multiple locations based on the call origin, load balancing between multiple call centres or time or day. While this data was originally maintained by telephone companies, the breakup of the Bell System in the 1980s and the introduction of toll-free number portability in 1993 required an independent operator maintain the SMS/800 database. If the Service Management System were a central registry that controls routing on all toll-free telephone numbers, the RespOrgs would be its registrars. Many RespOrgs are telephone companies or long-distance carriers; a toll-free number provided by a carrier is bundled with RespOrg service adequate to send all calls through that one carrier to a single local destination number. A large subscriber with more complex requirements could use an independent RespOrg to direct calls for an individual number to multiple carriers for least-cost routing or to provide disaster recovery. A number which reaches multiple call centres via multiple carriers can be configured to avoid any single point of failure; any change to a number's routing can be propagated throughout the network in fifteen minutes.〔(Inbound LCR gains ground ), Aelea Christofferson, Phone Plus, Virgo Publishing, August 2004.〕 An independent RespOrg may also hold an advantage in obtaining vanity phonewords by reserving recently-disconnected numbers for its clients in the first few seconds after they become available. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「RespOrg」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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