The suggestion upthread is that there won’t be a shortage of numbers until 2050 or so, meaning a changes might need to begin in 2035 or so. That’s more than a decade from now. There will be a much smaller number of people who are still manually entering memorized phone numbers by then.
Got a flyer in my cell phone bill this week saying the same thing is occurring at the same time in eastern Wisconsin for the same suicide hotline reason. Cell and landlines are affected. I am assuming some regulation is being enforced nationally.
Anyone?
This is a reasonable question. But I think the only reasonable answer would be “a long time”.
Adding one extra digit would give us ten times as many phone numbers as currently. So it would effectively mean, “We get to reuse all the numbers we’ve ever had. And then again eight more times.”
Anyone who is going to estimate how much time that will buy us, will base that estimate on various presumptions and guesses. It is my belief that those presumptions and guesses will ultimately be less important than the changes in technology over the coming decades. Those changes will determine how long the supply of phone number will last, and our guesses today will be meaningless.
For example: A few decades ago, we thought the system would last a long time. Then there was an explosion of fax machines, phone modems, and burglar alarms, and we panicked about running out of numbers soon. Then they Then they figured out how to make it so that the telcos could get new numbers in blocks smaller than 10,000 (i.e., not an entire exchange) and that got us decades of breathing room. Who knows what will happen in the future?
Digits are added at the front because that’s the way the hardware worked: If you added one digit at the front, you added one 10-way location split at the front. If you added a digit at the back, you needed to add an extra rack to every line at every exchange. Then the physical system was replicated by a software system with the same switching topology.
They could re-implement the whole system the way IPV6 has been implemented, and detach location (local exchange) from phone number. Mobile phones are already pretty much that way. The reason they haven’t done so for local numbers is, they will have to replace all the exchange equipment. They can handle a small number of exceptions, but they can’t make every number an exception. If they’d made the decision 10 years ago, they could be starting now. They will make that decision in the future, but they’ve got another 30 years before it has to be that way.
“At the front” meaning, in my example of (123) 456-7890, before the 1, 4 or 7?
I remember reading about how the area codes were assigned, and realized it was here.
On the rotary-dial phones then in use, dialing a nine took a lot longer than dialing a one, which tied up expensive switching equipment. So AT&T assigned “low dial pull” numbers to the markets with the most telephones and thus presumably the highest number of incoming long-distance calls. New York got 212, Chicago 312, LA 213, Detroit 313, Dallas 214, and so on.
BTW, you might find it interesting to look at the map of the original 86 area codes assigned to the 48 states in 1947. All of Florida was 305. 518 covered a huge part of New York State, from above the NYC suburbs to the Canadian border. There were only three area codes for all of California.
Wow, cool map, thanks - those were the days!
One correction to my post, though. The original 86 area codes were assigned to the 48 US states and Canada, not just the 48 US states.
I’m kinda impressed that Ohio had 4.
Works out well enough that each of the major cities had its own area code though.
The original area codes were part of the North American Numbering Plan, and it wasn’t just Canada and the US. Mexico had 903 and 905 and the Caribbean was given 809. In the late 20th century, those were reclaimed and the areas were given country codes like other international destinations.
I have speculated that this may not have been entirely driven by the need for more area codes. I’ve wondered whether Mexico’s government-owned telco was watching the 1980s deregulation of long distance rates in the US with some concern, and preferred to shift to an international scheme where they could retain more control over pricing.
In looking stuff up for this post, I was surprised to learn that the Dutch Caribbean territory of Sint Maarten joined the NANP in September 2011, receiving area code 721.