|
North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical 40lb Marshmallow Bags
FYI. An interesting article on how some others administer a numbering plan. "...We are not out of phone numbers. It turns out there are plenty of unused phone numbers out there, millions of them. After the phone company was decentralized in 1984, competing carriers arose. Some were very small. They needed phone numbers to distribute to their new clients. The North American Numbering Plan gave out the numbers, one exchange at a time. An exchange was a package of 10,000 phone numbers, and you had to take them all, even if you didn't have enough customers. This was necessary, according to [Ronald] Conners [administrator of the NANP], because the phone company's switching equipment required the first six digits -- the area code and the exchange -- to identify the billing and routing of a call. It could not further subdivide the number without causing chaos. Unfortunately, this also resulted in many unused numbers. Millions of unused numbers. Conners talks of this as though it were inevitable. This is like Giant selling marshmallows only in 40-pound bags, and then sadly lamenting that there are a lot of stale marshmallows out there in people's homes. ..." -scott http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-02/22/077l-022298-idx.html
|