In article <200006230005.SAA11801@tcb.net>, Danny McPherson <danny@tcb.net> wrote:

It's interesting that for quite a while nearly 30K PSTN 800 numbers were allocated nearly every week, with number portability and all. Perhaps we're simply missing something :-)

As has been observed many times on NANOG, one of the advantages that a circuit-switched network like the PSTN has over a packet-switched network like the Internet is that the PSTN has leisurely call setup times and relatively infrequent routing table lookups. No long-distance carrier processes even 100 million phone calls in a day networkwide; yet there are many routers which process billions of packets daily *per interface*. -- Shields.