8.5 million people take advantage of cellphone number portability

It didn't even come close to the 30 million switchers that had been predicted, but the FCC is prepping a report that says that 7.8 million people took advantage of the new cellphone number portability rules that went into effect a year ago (an increasingly rare instance of the FCC siding with consumers over the megacorps) to take their phone number with them when they switched to a new wireless carrier, and that another 750,000 people moved their home or office number to a cellphone (9,000 went the other way and ported their cellphne number to a landline). The biggest winners? Verizon and T-Mobile, which scooped up more subscribers than they lost. Biggest loser? AT&T Wireless, which hemmorhaged customers and eventually got swallowed up by Cingular (whether the new portability rules hastened their demise or not is a matter of debate, but they really screwed up the whole portability process and alienated a lot of people).