Mobile phone has become a basic necessity of our lives. It’s hard to find a person who doesn’t use one.
Each and every person is familiar with PhoneBook, where you can store your friends’ names and their respective phone numbers. Consequently, when your friend calls you, it checks his/her number with the set of phone numbers that you have stored in your mobile and displays his/her name on your mobile screen. Ex.: Consider that Michael Jackson is your friend and you have stored his mobile number, which is 767 5464, in your mobile. When you get a call from 767 5464, it shows “Michael Jackson calling” and not “767 5464 calling”.
Let’s say that you get a call from a stranger. By stranger I mean a person whose phone number is not stored in your mobile. Hence, his number will be displayed on your mobile. What really happened is this – when the stranger initiates a call to you, he sends his phone number to the base station. The base station then finds you and forwards that phone number to your mobile. Your mobile would then check if that number is stored in its flash memory. In this case, it hasn’t been stored and hence would display his number on your mobile screen. My question is “Can we not have a ‘look-up system’ in place which will retrieve the name of the stranger and then forward both his name and number to you rather than forwarding just his number???” I think this feature will be very useful.
Each phone number is registered under a name. With this look-up table whenever you get a call (or an sms), you will at least know the name of the person/organization. Will building such a system be overkill for adding just one feature??? Will this system be an overhead to operations such as call or sms??? Are there any other constraints, technical or otherwise??? Why hasn’t any mobile/base station company implemented this yet???
pristinecrap.com 
More than one reason not to do so …1> You are talking of one call. The basic packet that gets routed to you via the mobile network has the source and the destination plus a few other blah details. You are essentially asking for that packet to be piggybacked on a much larger one in which the name is present. For a million billion calls that must be happening everyday I think we are talking of a sizable overhead on the transmission line.2> Please remember that a call never gets routed directly under most circumstances. It'll go via many gateways, base stations, control stations etc before it reaches you. For the kind of feature that you want it represents an additional task of routing through a server which has the name details of the caller. Which again poses a big problem I would say.3> You are talking of an extra database look up. Meaning you are introducing a point of delay in your system which is related to how fast can you perform a database look up.4> Most simple reason. Why the fuck do you wanna know who's calling? Can you not just ask him? Its because of people like you that they invented a pen that writes in space, investing millions of worthless bucks, when things could be done with a pencil …
Sagar has given a lot of tech reasons… here is a simple reason not to do so….A lot of times the phone is registered to one person and being used by someone else…. So tats a problem…Other is if i want to stalk a girl tat might be a problem….
And btw…. why u posting blogs at 4 in the morning….
^ you want to stalk a girl?bwahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!muahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!}:-D
where the hell did i go, when my fellow CK-ians are here.. Sagar: it could just be an addon, provided you pay 30rs per month, the extra database lookup is justified, (you subscribe for 6 months special discount @rs100 and the scheme becomes free after 2 months, yet since you have subscribed they’ll continue to eat your money, isn’t it right pranav)sagar imagine if “BULB” calls you and you knew it before answering.Pranav: you want to stalk, bugger
@big foot: regarding 1>… thats a valid point you made. But consider the amount of information that is already gettting transmitted. Another 25 bytes or so for a name isnt much of a overhead. If that is really the case, then we cannot even think of adding new features such as ringtone download or email checking. Even these features require more bandwidth and there are million billion people downloading stuff daily. But all the networks work just fine and people are thinking of adding new features continuously. So point 1> is not a valid argument.2> same as point 1>. It doesn't matter how the call gets routed or how many times. In today's world of advanced and faster computing, the latency to get a name from a 'name server' is negligible. Also consider that there will be cache and stuff… so you don't need to get the name everytime. 3> Are you skeptical about the speed of today's database look up??? Consider that 1 billion (that's the max) mobiles phones are in use today. A look up with 1 billion records with all the distributed computing, scalability, caching and the like… come on dude… it's very much practical.4> Why do you keep proving that u are DUMB over and over again??? We all know that u are DUMB and we have no doubts about it. I am talking about the "need" and not the "design" of the system. Can't u understand that??? There was a need to write in space (if at all). Its people like you, who don't think properly, invented a pen that writes in space when things could be done with a pencil… I am interested in the need and not in the implementation. Do you understand the difference between need and design??? "Think before you ink!!!"A simpler reasoning would be that the infrastructure required for this feature is very high and it won't work out or something like that. Or better still, you can hardcode a name in the SIM card itself. So no lookup, no extra routing and all the other stuff that u mentioned. Don't come up with a weird comment telling that a name cannot be written on the SIM or something like that. I am just telling all options available. There could be simpler ways too. "Need v/s Design" … understand dude.@Pranav: in the last paragraph I mentioned that phone number could be registered under a person/organization. In an organization, a lot of people might use the same number. But atleast the organization's name can be displayed. So, your opinion is similar to this and hence not strong enough to reject the feature.regarding stalking a girl… NO COMMENTS :)@Techie: that's a good point. But as I said earlier in my comment, if cost of setting up the infrastructure is very high, then addon is not a valid option. Such a feature should be available to everyone. If the service providers increase call charges even by 1 paise per call, the cost will be recovered in no time i.e if at all money is a problem.Atleast I have one person who is convinced about the need to have such a system. I hope so.
Just a thought!”Mobile phone has become a basic necessity of our lives. It’s hard to find a person who doesn’t use one.” – True. Now consider this situation (assume your above mentioned feature is in place):You receive a call on your mobile. Trring! TTrrrrrrring! “Michael Jackson calling”. Excited, overwhelmed, your hands fail to hol d the phone. It falls down – fortunately it is still in one piece ringing!! You consider yourselves the luckiest person on earth, pickup the call hurriedly and startoff “Hello Mikey! OOps may I call you so? I love your songs! Your moon dan…”. You stop abruptly on hearing a sound from the other end – “Anna, thande, KG Road pootpath myage kunthivni. Vasi bandu 100 rs donation aakthira? Bhikshe alla anna, donation …”