Area Codes 500 and 700 (North America)

Factual Questions
1

I read the Wikipedia articles on them

But I am not getting quite what the article says. It doesn’t seem to make sense to me. Can anyone explain it a little better?

Thanks

2

NANPA originally assigned area code 500 for a special class of services that included things like a primitive version of call-forwarding. For example, you could pay for a 500-XXX-XXXX number, and then inform your long distance company of the “real” number where you were currently located, and customers calling the 500 number would be forwarded to the real number. Like 800 and 900 numbers, these are a special non-geographic class of area codes.

These services never really caught on for personal use, due to their poor marketability and the fact that the caller would have to pay when you forwarded the number to Uzbekistan.

The 700 area code is another special non-geographic code which was introduced back when the first non-monopoly long-distance companies were coming on line. The idea was, while every POTS number uniquely identifies one subscriber line in North America, the 700 numbers could all be used by every long distance carrier. If you called a 700 number, you would be connected to whatever service your long-distance provider supplied for that number. So two people could get two entirely different things at the same 700 number if they subscribed to different long distance carriers.

These likewise were not very popular due to confusion.

3

If I understand the articles correctly, they’re saying that area codes 500 and 700 are assigned not to geographic areas, but to specific phone companies to use for their own purposes. Thus, if you dial 700-555-4567 from a phone that uses Sprint, it may connect you to Sprint central headquarters, but the same number dialed on Verizon phone may give you Verizon tech support, and on an AT&T phone might be assigned to AT&T Human Resources. Also, since they’re neither assigned to specific geographical regions nor toll-free numbers, you have no idea whether calling a 500 or 700 number will be a local or a long-distance call.