Ten-Digit Dialing
I got an interesting notice yesterday from my mobile phone service provider, which happens to be Spectrum (since they offer the Verizon system without the added Verizon cost structure and smarmy, cheating ways as documented in previous stories). The notice was intended for their customers to inform them that from now on there is no such thing as “local calling” and that all calls must heretofore be placed with a full ten-digit number input. In other words, we are no longer being recognized by our carriers as being in one locale and therefore not needing to identify that area code to place calls within that zone. We now have to input all ten digits of a number in order for the call to be placed. By my reckoning, with almost 8,000,000,000 people on this earth and more than 91% of them having some form of mobile communication device (increasingly smartphones that also enable digital connectivity for commerce and general internet access in addition to more simple voice communication), that jives with the whole ten-digit program. If I am thinking correctly, there are 9,999,999,999 unique ten-digit numbers and 7,260,000,000 of them must be assigned for that many mobile users. But wait, assuming that proper numbers cannot start with one or more zeros, I should deduct 1,000,000,000 numbers from that count since everything from 0,000,000,001 to 0,999,999,999 cannot be used. Therefore, there are only 8,999,999,999 unique and usable ten-digit numbers for those 7,260,000,000 users who are growing by 160,000,000 per year (at least that 2.25% increase was the case between 2021 and 2022). At that rate, using straightforward compounding math without any acceleration (which has, of course, been happening), we will be out of ten digit numbers in less than seven years.
I try hard not to concern myself unreasonably with things I cannot change and I use the standard serenity prayer to do my best to accept those things. That is especially true about things that will evolve meaningfully beyond the timeframe of my life expectancy. Now, as a liberal-minded individual, I tend to think that it is my responsibility to look beyond just myself and my use of this planet and its resources, so i do care about the future that my children and grandchildren face, but its hard to say that the mobile communications infrastructure should rise to level of disturbing my peace. I think there is a larger issue at play ere that deserves at least a bit of pondering.
When I was sent this notice from Spectrum that we must all now use ten-digit dialing rather than assume we can just dial seven digits to get people within out own area code and locale, they added a specific justification for that. They said that this was a necessary step to accommodate the 988 dialing protocol. 988 is the exchange designated for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. It seems that any number with an area code of 988 gets automatically directed to the Hotline to help keep someone from jumping off the literal or proverbial ledge. We have all heard that the suicide rate has gone up a great deal during COVID. Specifically, suicide is the 12th leading cause of death in the United States. As of 2020 there were almost 46,000 suicides in the U.S. and 1.2 million suicide attempts. That’s less than a 4% suicide success rate, which probably goes to the notion that people may be less committed to the path of ending their lives than making a statement (whether to themselves or others) about the futility of this lives.
The first mathematical reality of this is that this hotline eliminates 1,000,000 possible numbers, which reminds me that there are a number of other area code prefixes (like 800 or 900 or 888) that are also eliminated from use. One would hope that saving 1,000,000 numbers for that exchange would be enough, though with so may suicide attempts each year and the growth of troubled people attempting suicide might mean that there may be some cross-over of need….though presumably after dialing 988, all else about the number being dialed is meaningless. That all says to me that in reality, the ten-digit number roster is actually closer to 8,000,000,000 available numbers and thus….we are only a year or two away from running out of numbers.
I am not entirely clear about why the ten-digit number issue should be driven by the access to the Suicide Prevention Hotline, as much as attention to that concern is justified. Do old telephone numbers die along with people or do they just get reassigned? I presume the later, and, of course, that could always lead to an issue if someone’s woes get transposed to another person by virtue of being reassigned to their old number. Interesting issue that perhaps deserves some consideration for a “cooling off” period for old numbers so that there are no negative carry-overs attached to being randomly assigned a “troubled” number. Naturally, all of that will cut into the availability of ten-digit numbers. Also, many people of means have more than one number. I therefore suspect that we are already out of numbers in a ten-digit world and that before long we will have to move to an eleven-digit world, which would add another 99,999,999,999 numbers to the array minus the usual array of deletions for special-purpose exchanges like the Suicide Prevention Hotline. If the communications infrastructure people have their way, I suspect someone will say, let’s go to twelve-digit dialing rather than stop at eleven. Of course, the way base ten works, that means going to twelve digits expands the array of available numbers by almost 1 trillion numbers. We are now getting into a surreal realm where the world is more likely to end long before we get a trillion phones to worry about. I imagine the spectrum police (not Spectrum the company, but spectrum the bandwidth) will have something to say about how many phone lines can be squeezed into whatever bandwidth is represented by the cellular system. The heavens are not limitless in their capacity to take voice and or data dumping.
So, the question is whether any of us should care about this ten-digit dialing requirement. I pretty much use ten digits when I dial any number. Actually, I belt and suspender it and throw a 1 up front just to be sure, so I guess I am already doing eleven-digit dialing. And there you have it. You now know everything there is to know about ten or eleven digit dialing and I’m betting most of you have had more than enough of the topic and the digits.