Re: Augmenting mobile-broadband-provider-info

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-11-22 at 11:25 +0100, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> some guys and me are working on the freesmartphone.org projects and
> recently I stumbled over mobile-broadband-provider-info. As among the
> network/phone crowd there is a great need for such a central database,
> we would love to use and base on that. Some things I feel are missing in
> there though -- would you object to augment it with additional
> information such as:
> 
> * full name per country

Does /usr/share/zoneinfo/iso3166.tab not work for you?  The only thing
that's missing is localization though.

> * dial prefix per country

Do you mean the international dial code like +1 for the US, etc?  We
could do this.

Or do you mean the in-country provider-specific dial prefix, if that
country assigns a block of numbers to a specific provider?  This
wouldn't continue to work in the future as many countries are moving to
number portability between providers (at least in the US and Europe).

> * list of timezones per country

That seems like the wrong place for this sort of thing.  There's got to
be something else that provides timezone info on the system, and that's
probably a better place to put that information, not in the
serviceproviders database.

> I know that all these information are available from other (often in the
> form of lists of text) sources, but they are lacking the cross
> references which we're after -- e.g. to get the timezone for a country
> that has a certain MCC assigned.

Yeah, but given that some of this information would then be duplicated
(timezones) I don't think it the mbp database is the right place to put
that.  You may need to open a few databases to find this info out, but I
think that's an acceptable tradeoff to adding duplicated information to
the DB...

> I realize it would be more than just a mobile-broadband-provider-info
> database in that case, but I'd rather see us contributing to this
> project than creating another one.

At least in the case of the timezone db, I think there's better places
to put that.  I realize not all platforms use glibc, but I have to
believe that even if you don't, there's going to be some timezone/locale
information already on the system that it would be a shame to duplicate.

Dan