{"id":135,"date":"2007-04-15T15:05:13","date_gmt":"2007-04-15T19:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/2007\/04\/15\/are-we-running-out-of-phone-numbers\/"},"modified":"2007-04-15T15:08:05","modified_gmt":"2007-04-15T19:08:05","slug":"are-we-running-out-of-phone-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/2007\/04\/15\/are-we-running-out-of-phone-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Are we running out of phone numbers?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This question was posed to me a few days ago and I did some digging to find out the answer, here in the US.\u00a0 For years, there had been some debate over whether we were headed to a situation where these 10 digit numbers were going to have to be increased by a digit or two, particularly given the explosion of mobile phones and second lines in the home.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Here some basic math on the numbers available.\u00a0 According to the FCC, it turns out that each area code in the US has approximately 8 million numbers available.\u00a0 Currently there are about 660 area codes available in North America, with\u00a0over 300 areas currently in use.\u00a0 Thus, there is approximately 5.3 billion potential numbers available, based on 660 area codes.\u00a0 Thats a lot of numbers.<\/p>\n<p>So why the problem.\u00a0 The problem in the past has been that telco providers bought telephone numbers in 10,000 blocks.\u00a0\u00a0 Thus if a provider only used 100 numbers, there were 9,900 numbers that went unused.\u00a0 Well, they finally got smart and pooled the unused numbers.\u00a0 Therefore, the short answer is that we are not in immediate danger of running out of phone numbers.\u00a0 Although I still question\u00a0why we\u00a0haven&#8217;t\u00a0moved to a more DNS-based structure to deal with these hard to remember, 10 digit numbers, that in many ways are very personal and private to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This question was posed to me a few days ago and I did some digging to find out the answer, here in the US.\u00a0 For years, there had been some debate over whether we were headed to a situation where these 10 digit numbers were going to have to be increased by a digit or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contextual-directory"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/216"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sunnyahn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}