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
Scott Huddle sez:
An interesting article on how some others administer a numbering plan.
"...We are not out of phone numbers.
....
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.
Well, which costs less (and least threatens integrity of the system).. 1)adding new NPA overlays, or 2) rewriting millions of dollars worth of CO and tandem code? While it's easy to make cheap talk about #2, it is anything but to really do so... This is after all, real-time, ultra-high-reliability, [did you try your BANS phone yesterday.....;-?] resource-constrained code... Note that the decisions that predicated the full-prefix increment were made many decades ago and for sound reasons. [I seem to recall that some other folks who used to route on much smaller divisions CHANGED their mind when they ran into problems, and increased the size of the increment....but I can not remember exactly who that was..... ;-] They have help up pretty well in the face of totally unpredicable changes [MFJ, Murdock Telcom Act, etc.] -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
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Scott Huddle
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wb8foz@nrk.com