How are there enough phone numbers

Dwindling numbers Only half as many telephone numbers are left for North America as were once available. History has shown that even smaller changes to telephone numbers have caused problems for carriers.

Several years ago area codes changed to include something other than a 1 or 0 as the second digit. Some companies discovered much of their equipment was hard coded to read only a 1 or 0 in that part of a telephone number, so they needed to buy new phone networks.

But others say simply conserving the existing numbers is the best tactic. The industry should continue to keep using conservation measures that have been in place since , such as rationing telephone numbers, said Lori Messing, director of numbering issues for telephone lobbyists the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. To this end, the FCC has stepped in and told telecommunication carriers they won't be able to buy telephone numbers in blocks of 10, anymore.

Instead, it will be blocks of 1, Messing said the industry supports the effort. She said it would be better to rely on NANPA, which gets reports every six months from state public utility commissions and carriers about how many telephone numbers they need and have used. It takes charge and can, for example, "reclaim" unused phone numbers from carriers or lower the number of area codes it is willing to provide. Apple failed this time, but it will try again and likely succeed next time.

My Health Record mobile app for account holders to launch in early The internet has greatly surpassed all of the functionality that the old telephone networks once provided. Do we really still need both when the internet does everything and does everything better? There are actually a lot of hacks that make phone network services work over the internet. We can use actual people names and domain names to represent VoIP user accounts. Large businesses often use internet-protocol phones instead of phone-network phones because you can control them internally with your own server software just like you can with email, file sharing, intranet websites, applications, etc.

Many carriers have started using their internet networks for phone services too. LTE is a wireless internet protocol that most phones use these days to access the internet. Does that make sense? Not really! Secondly, the 12 digit IP addresses that we normally use as part of IPv4 could quite possible run out just like regular phone numbers will in Japan, but we already have a solution. IPv6 is a newer way of defining internet protocol addresses that was started in and became a standard in This type of addressing uses bits so that we can get about 3.

Any of those can be assigned to your website, your video calling server, your electronic messaging server, etc. You can host each one of those yourself or you can pay a cloud service to host them or mix and match.

Using names is so much easier! So why are we still using 1. Yet, phone calls and text messages still depend on centralized proprietary phone company networks for some reason. When it comes to video calling there is no standard that federates with all phone systems at the moment. Moving to DNS for phone calls would open up the opportunity to add a standard for video calling on top of that.

They should also offer their customers standard interpersonal communications server hosting included with each plan… BUT it would open up many opportunities for competition and that could be a very good thing.

It would probably also reduce costs for the phone companies since routing everything over the internet pipes would reduce the need to maintain a second network for legacy telephony functions.

If we had a standard interpersonal communications protocol, anyone with the know-how could open up a small business for hosting personal communications services… or large businesses could install their own communications servers in order to lock down their security some already do this using proprietary VoIP systems like Skype for Business Server … or you could install your own servers at home in order to manage things yourself, maintain freedom, and reduce costs.

Why not phone calls? Actually, the other day I spent 2 hours programming my own video calling service that friends can access using a URL to a web app. I wrote my own notification system for it using Classic ASP of all things. My friends can access it by tapping the URL that I made with my Domain Name Server which I can send them via email or any other electronic messaging service or all of them.

They can save that URL as a web-app and have one-tap calling access to me over the internet. None of those really need a phone to work since they all use the internet to transfer data.

A lot of these companies are using phone company phone numbers as your user ID. One reason they do this is to be able to match you with other people in your contacts list. New suffixes on old prefixes would be through , and new suffixes on new prefixes would be through All that said, if we were to somehow run out of numbers before the concept of a phone number becomes obsolete, we could simply add a digit to the exchange or area code, as was done in the UK when they ran out.

Three decimal goes through which equals possible numbers…. The solution is to free up more ten digit numbers that would be allowed to become telephone numbers. There is no reason it is not technically possible. Given this, we do not need to add more decimal places to a telephone number, with ten decimal places we already have ten billion numbers to choose from. Your email address will not be published. October 3, at pm.

There are several other restrictions in place, which bring the total down further. The final figure is probably still around 7 billion total, and less that are actually assignable. Sally says:. September 5, at am.

May 6, at am. The solution is usually adding a digit to the prefix rather than suffix. Look at other countries that have run out of numbers such as the UK. AJ says:. November 5, at pm. Yep, I am believing that the future of voice communications will be slowly transitioned to general server and networking protocols.. Google, skype, and other networking communications is a good example of this taking place. While wireless has become the dominant com source, you can bet our increasingly fried microwave airspace will adapt to not only an optional form of Communication IDs but an increasing default of future communication among people in the U.