Now that American area codes no longer need to have a “1” or “0” in the middle, and overlays mean two houses right next door to each other might have different area codes, there are many more phone numbers available than, say, 20 years ago. But given the explosion of wireless, fax, cellphones, etc., sooner or later I suspect we’re gonna need more phone numbers.
Let’s say my phone number is (216) 555-5670 (it isn’t). When the Telephone Powers That Be (TPTB) decide more phone numbers are needed, they could program their computers to accomodate just one more digit for every number dialed. If you already had a phone number when the changeover was made, you’d simply repeat the last digit. My family and friends wouldn’t have to remember a new number - I wouldn’t have to get new business cards, stationery, etc. - anyone knowing or looking at my pre-changeover number would know to simply add another “0” to reach me. And nine new phone numbers (the same as mine, but ending in “1” through “9”) could be created in my area code by the TPTB. Multiply that by all the numbers that already existed, and that should last us for a loooooooooong time.
So, with your plan some new subscriber would have 555-5670? and you would have 555-56700? I see trouble with mix ups and people forgetting if a number they have for someone is pre or post change. IOW, lots of wrong number calls.
Why not give the new subscriber the extra-00 and you keep the original?
Then basically what this boils down to is going to an 8 digit numbering system.
You could easily tell if it was pre or post change by counting the digits. The OP’s business card would only have seven digits, and the new subscriber would have eight.
It’s a half bad idea though; the firmware and software changes required to effect it would be immense.
I would suggest doing away with area codes completely, and simply giving everyone a ten digit number.
No, as I read it, the number would change to 555-56700 (making possible nine other numbers 555-56701 to 555-56709) - anyone reading a business card that said 555-5670 would know that the missing digit was to be a repeat of the last one
Plus, you can’t have a seven and eight digit system in place at the same time with similar numbers. How would the phone know not to stop at 555-5670 or wait till you dialed another 0?
Coming up with the numbering scheme is not that big a deal - the problem is in updating all the phone equipment to deal with it.
This will all be irrelevant in a decade or so anyway, when everything goes over the Internet and IPV6 means that we can assign a few thousand IP addresses to every square millimeter of the earth.
I just checked, and my statement was wrong - IPV6 will allow us to assign 667 quadrillion addresses to every square millimeter of the Earth. That’s 667 million billions of address per square millimeter.
So, we could easily spare a few thousand for some kind of geographical addressing scheme.
Kind of makes worrying about phone numbers seem silly, doesn’t it?
Why use numbers at all? I’m all for using Unicode names in an X.500-ish (or a DNS-ish) hierarichal directory system. It’s much much easier to remember a name than a number, IMHO.
Phone keypads suck. Aside from the fact they’re upside-down from a 10-key layout, they’re also arbitrarily limited to 12 keys. I’m constantly misdialing numbers that I could pound out, accurately, in less than a second on a civilized keyboard.
Very interesting link, mks57. As I read it, depending on a lot of factors including the development of new technologies or changes in social patterns, they project the exhaustion of currently-available phone numbers sometime between 2024 and 2038. I’m not convinced of the need to go to four-digit area codes in addition to five-digit suffixes, but it would certainly create lots o’ new potential numbers.
I like some of the other technofixes suggested by the other posters, too. In a decade or two, I suppose, we may figure out something else entirely.
Yeah, I suspect phone numbers will become obsolete within a few decades. Just a bit of a guess and all, but I think it would be easy to change cell phones and the like into IP Addresses, or even sub-domain name registering depending on your cell phone provider.
As for the crazy number of IP addresses with IPV6 - 10^38 or so, right? Is that enough to give every neuron in every human brain its own IP address? Eh, probably not, but with technology increasing, every phone, PDA, and and the like having it’s own IP address, that doesn’t leave much left for all the nanites to have their own IP address.
I would go further than that and predict within the next twenty years the current phone system infrastructure will be an anachronism if it exists at all. The cost of maintaining they physical media and local stations versus the cost of operating a broadband wireless microwave network will make the former noncompetitive. This will accelerate once the 802.16 “WiMan” (commonly, if somewhat incorrectly, known as WiMAX) standard is implemented commercially. There will still be station-to-station infrastructure (I assume, owing to physical limitations with data bandwidth) but local infrastructure–i.e. the wires coming to your home–will be as much a curiosity in North America and Europe as it is in South America or Africa. Ditto (most likely) for digital cable t.v.
As for IPv6, remember that it’s not just people, but the devices that it identifies. It’s a very wise move to make the number of addresses as excessive as feasible because you’ll never know when some innovation will amplify the requirement for IP addresses by orders of magnitude. Of course, that begs the question of how long TCP/IP–a protocol dating from the mid-Seventies–will remain in use. It is expandable to an extent probably not imagined by its inventors, but eventually better and more appropriate protocols will probably outclass it.
