As I understand it, approximately 50 million numbers have been registered so far. My question is how many people does this actually represent? If you consider the fact that one residential phone number may serve a household with more than one person living there, and that office as well as residential numbers are probably represented, but many office numbers serve a group of people, and that cell phone numbers (as I understand) are already exempt and hence do not need to be registered, would not the number of people affected by the DNC registry be much, much larger?
However some people did register their cell phones, “Just in case” and some people have more than one number, such as a work phone, home office phone, etc.
I imagine it represents pretty much somewhere between 50 million and much less than a hundred million.
There is always the overwhelming “who cares” faction that just hangs up on people anyway.
According to the CIA world factbook entry for USA there are 194 million telephone lines in use for 290 million people (1997). So in theory it would affect more people than telephone lines (about 50% more). I don’t know about that figure and if it includes business lines, etc. It doesn’t include cell phone lines, which numbered about 69 million in 1998.