As you can imagine responding quickly to the correct address is important for emergency responders. It is infinitely easier now with reliable GPS apps. Back in my day (contrary to popular belief we did have cars not horses) weird numbering could be a real problem. For the most part my area was pretty logical. There were some exceptions. A busy county road formed part of the border. The addresses on the side of the other town had absolutely no correlation with the numbers on our side. The bigger issue was with newer townhouse developments that were laid out haphazardly. One block of buildings could be numbered 101 through 115. Running through to get to a hot call you expect the first unit in the next building to be 116 but instead it’s 132. Then you have to double back and try to find the right building.
It doesn’t even necessarily tell you where you lived in 2005 ( or any other year) . My cell phone starts with an area code that was only issued to cell phones and pagers to people opening accounts in at least two different area codes.
At the time that was published it was largely true.
As you point out, as time has marched on there are ever more exceptions to that static rule. If nothing else, one hell of a lot of people not yet born in 2005 have phones now, 20 years later.
I’m going to bet that most well-off kids get their first cell phone and number at an age between 5 & 10. And most will keep that number for life, net of future changes to the very structure of US / Canadian / Caribbean phone numbers. See North American Numbering Plan expansion - Wikipedia for more if interested.
That particular xkcd cartoon is from 2012 (at least discussion entries on the explainxkcd wiki go back that far), so I suppose at that time it was quite correct - seven years after the year that the cartoon references, but after the release of the first few generations of iPhones.
And, though it was apparently no longer true in 2005, for many years, the first three digits of a seven-digit phone number weren’t random. For land lines, those numbers were determined by which local exchange your phone line connected to.
In 1996, when my wife and I bought our house, and moved about six miles, from one Chicago suburb to another, we asked Ameritech (our Baby Bell of that era) if we could keep our home phone number. “Nope, not possible, your new house is in a different exchange.” (Local Number Portability apparently became a thing just a year or two after that.)
And, originally, the first three digits of mobile numbers were determined by which cell phone carrier you had. Until around 2003, if you changed cell-phone companies, you had to get a different number.
Yeah.
It is still generally true that the first three of seven newly-issued landline digits is strictly geographical. With exceptions, albeit mostly for businesses, not residential / consumer. And is still generally true that the first 3 digits of a freshly issued mobile number are specific to that mobile carrier within that “area code”.
What changed everything was number portability; who initially issues numbers according to what standard groupings remains largely unchanged. But any given number can later be moved anywhere.
Within the telco world, number portability, once mandated by FCC on a rather short timeline, was a crisis IT project akin to Y2K where the deadlines were tight and failure was not an option. Lotta programmers burnt a lot of midnight oil. And a lot of aging electro-mechanical infrastructure was sent to the dump a decade or three ahead of the depreciation schedule and replaced with new software-based systems. It was a truly vast project unappreciated outside the industry.
And after that, portability still didn’t work flawlessly. After a couple of changes, your number could get lost in the system, with some callers forwarded to the wrong company. Apparently they’ve pretty much sorted that now.
I’ve still got problems with call prefixes, even though the only ones left are state and international. My phone only does exact matches, so depending on how the call is reported, it either matches something in my contact list, or not.