Cellular Network Squatting?

Sun Cellular (the mobile cellular network of Digitel) has revolutionized the local cellular phone industry when they introduced their 24/7 Unlimited promo around a year ago. Although their per-minute charges were a bit lower than the other big cellular telcos, their business took off as their 24/7 Unlimited promo was introduced. 24/7 Unlimited allows a SUN subscriber to do unlimited voice call to fellow SUN subscribers -- no per minute charges. Because of this, a lot of people started sporting two cellphones, one is using either a SMART or GLOBE SIM card and the other is their SUN line. What they do is use the phone with the SUN SIM card to do their long voicecalls while most of them retain their *other* SIM card mainly because they have a certain attachment to the phone number or that its for their "business" calls.

Recently, some enterprising individuals are taking advantage of the unlimited voice calls that SUN Cellular provides. They have set up some sort of a cellphone-to-landline patch that allows SUN Cellular subscribers to call a certain SUN Cellular cellphone number, once that number "answers" another "dial tone" will be heard and the caller can then call any landline number. This allows SUN's 24/7 Unlimited users to talk to landline subscribers indefinitely -- as if they are talking with fellow SUN Cellular subscribers. These enterprising individual charges a flat monthly fee for the use of their "service". I'm not sure if this thing is illegal (that's why I won't link to these "service providers" for the time being) but this looks like a person is taking advantage of both the cellular phone infrastructure of SUN Cellular and the landline infrastructure of various telcos and I'm pretty sure that they have had no talks with both sides to make things transparent and legal. If that is indeed a case, then we might just have seen the start of a new kind of squatting!

technorati tags: telco, cellphone, tech, scam