The Ultimate Little Black Book

One Firm Routes All Phone Calls in North America

Once upon a time, there was one telephone company. Routing phone calls was pretty straightforward.

Now there are hundreds, and it's much more complicated. Whenever someone dials a phone, texts on a cellphone or punches in a Web site on a laptop, chances are the connection will rely on a central database that belongs to a Northern Virginia firm.

That database is perhaps the most significant cog in the communications network that most people have never heard of.

Sterling-based NeuStar is the carriers' digital directory for all phone calls in North America. More than 800 telephone companies have numbers in the database. NeuStar assigns blocks of available telephone numbers to carriers. It also manages the directory for common short codes: five- or six-digit codes that people punch into their cellphones to take part in sweepstakes or to vote for game-show contestants, for instance. And about one out of every four Internet transactions is routed using a NeuStar database, as NeuStar handles traffic for domains that include .biz, .us, .org and .info.

NeuStar's databases are so powerful that the FBI a few years ago sought direct, unfettered access to one containing 310 million phone numbers in the United States and Canada. The telephone companies that pay NeuStar to run the database denied the FBI's request, but they did allow NeuStar to create a site where authorized law enforcement officials with court orders can obtain carrier information on telephone numbers.

NeuStar is part of an evolving telecom industry that is creating caches of information attractive to the government without clear guidelines governing who may have access and under what circumstances. Its registries fall under international, U.S. government and trade association rules, including those set by the Federal Communications Commission.

The company is dependent on and crucial to telecom companies and state, local and federal governments, part of the government-industrial complex that drives the region's economy. Indeed, said Jeffrey E. Ganek, NeuStar chairman and chief executive, "this is a business that could only have grown up in Washington."

NeuStar was once a division of Lockheed Martin, where, under a different name, it was created in part to help carriers manage one aspect of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That law made it possible for consumers to keep their phone numbers even if they switched service providers or moved to another state. Competing telephone companies needed a way to keep track of those numbers to route calls. And other information, such as billing data, the FCC said, needed to be provided by a neutral, trusted party.

The current contracts, covering all of North America, run through 2015. The FCC created the rules that govern the contracts, but delegated oversight and administration of the contracts to the industry.

The carriers in 1997 awarded the work to Lockheed Information Management Systems. In 1999, Lockheed spun off the division, and NeuStar was born. It went public in 2005.

Revenue last year was $429.2 million, and profit was $92.3 million, up from $73.9 million the previous year. Company officials expect revenue to exceed $500 million this year. Soon, they said, NeuStar expects to be providing digital directory service for about 85 percent of all wireless devices in the world.

NeuStar officials say the government has not sought direct access to any of its databases other than the one the FBI requested, which covered numbers kept by customers as they switched providers, called a ported number registry.