TIL American cellphone numbers use an area code that represents the actual location. Do you get a new number if you move and then change to a different provider?
In Germany the cellphone area code is just out of a range your provider has registered and if you move to a different provider, you typically move over your number.
They stay with you if you choose. What's kind of sentimental and nice is that the area code stays with you as marker of where you're originally from no matter where you go. It says "this is where I was from as a teenager when I was first allowed a cell phone."
I don't know if this coincided with trend of getting an area code tattoo to signify where you're from, but that also is something that is done by some.
I remember the happy days when a telephone number (also an email) was a ephemeral, changeable thing. Not a permanent unchanging form of ID.
Alas, if you move out of the country for a period of time, it is a challenge to maintain the host country phone service. So there are no guarantees that you can hold on to that signifier of "this is where I was the last time I wanted to get a new phone subscription".
When was that? My parent’s landline number stayed unchanged for 20 years. Through moves, too (with the caveat they stayed in the service area of the CO.)
Same in Netherlands, France and UK as far as I know. Landlines have an area code, mobile numbers are all in a specific range that isn't linked to any location.
First time I got a cell phone in the US I was surprised I had to tell T-mobile my postal code and got a "local" number.
Yup, from NL, have moved everywhere and and changed provider a dozen times and have the same cellphone number since my first phone in 1999 or something.
I grew up in a small town in the US before cell phones were ubiquitous.
When we started getting cell phones, the numbers all had the same first six digits. The last four were assigned in order of provisioning.
My friend and I got our phones at nearly the same time, so our numbers were like 555-555-1004 and 555-555-1008.
This came in handy when I was going to visit him years later, and my phone died on the plane. I didn’t have anyone’s cell number memorized other than my parents (555-555-1013) and his thanks to the numeric similarity. (We kept the same phone numbers when we moved away from home.)
In this town, landline phones also all shared the same first six digits. Before cell phones got into the mix in the late 1990s, people could (and did) use 5 digits to represent phone numbers: 3-XXXX where the 3 referred to the first digit of the “exchange code”. The next town was 8-XXXX, etc.
So the author of the article was lucky it wasn’t someone who moved to Portland. I wonder what the ratio of people who have the area code of their actual location as a phone number is.
I was thinking the same thing; the city I'm in isn't even that large (approx 450k pop.) but I could probably go through my list of contacts that live in-town and rattle off at least two-dozen area codes that aren't native to the area (on top of the dozen or so that are), with at least half of those being out-of-province. The slow death of long-distance billing, which also finds itself competing with the likes of FaceTime et. al., coupled with the highly-mobile nature of cell phones, have just made it a hassle to go through the process of changing your phone number for anything other than moving to another country (or a wicked discount).
Isn't that regulated? In many places the operators are required to let you take the number with you when you change provider to obtain a better/ cheaper service. Everybody's numbers in practice go via some LUT that's mapping a human "telephone number" which people dial to an actual service endpoint which might move (after all, cell phones already move, so this indirection was necessary to make that work) and so the rule only needs to say that there's some means by which company A gets to change the LUT for your phone instead of company B.
This is the same in Canada. It isn't possible to distinguish landlines from cell phones by looking at the number. All numbers issued in an area have the same area code.
The North American numberig plan looks like +1-AAA-BBB-CCCC Where AAA is the area code and BBB-CCCC is mostly meaningless. There are a few special area codes like 8xx for toll-free calls (the classic 1-800 numbers that businesses often use) but no prefix dedicated to mobile.
When I moved to Ireland I thought it was weird that mobile numbers were identifiable. Especially since I had a Google voice number which looked like a landline which really confused people and websites. "Trust me, just text it. It is fine."
> Do you get a new number if you move
I don't know about the US but this used to be common in Canada. Many providers would consider calls to different cities long distance and charge extra. So if you moved it was "polite" to get a new number so that people could call you for local rates. For example I went to university in Ottawa and changed my Toronto number so that people didn't have to pay long distance to call (even though it is the same province, about a 5h drive).
However this isn't really the case anymore. In the US and mostly in Canada country-wide calling us pretty standard so most people's mobile number will reflect where they grew up, and they will carry that around for the rest of their lives.
> and then change to a different provider?
Usually not. You can ask your provider for a new number in a different city and they will issue it. Most Canadian providers are country-wide so you don't need to switch provide if you don't want to.
> Canada. It isn't possible to distinguish landlines from cell phones by looking at the number.
Atlantic Canada is small enough that there was a single area code for Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia up until a few years ago.
Cellphones in the region tend to have their own CO code (first three digits of the phone number), so you can usually infer if it’s a number you can text or not.
This is also the case for different regions of NS and PEI, so seeing a 902 number where the CO number is different from what you’re used to makes it seem “exotic”. This was also handy back in the day to know whether it was long distance or not.
This is slowly eroding as numbers get ported out, and landlines get disconnected.
> Usually not. You can ask your provider for a new number in a different city and they will issue it. Most Canadian providers are country-wide so you don't need to switch provide if you don't want to.
There's a way around this that I've done a few times. You port the number to VOIP (I use voip.ms) and then you set up that number to forward to whatever the new number you get given. Dialing out you still get your new number, but people dialing you can use the old number.
This was super handy when I had to move my mom from a retirement home in one city to another city a province away.
Practically forcing people to change mobile phone numbers when moving from one place to another is a level of evil I didn't not expect to exist in Canada.
Any idea if the premium was due to technical limitations or just to milk the customers?
You'd probably have to ask someone who worked in the phone industry at the time. I suspect that long-distance calls were legitimately quite expensive to provide at some point in the past, and the industry was happy to keep charging extra even as they reduced internal costs.
Luckily this is mostly behind us, almost all providers offer Canada-wide as a standard feature. Canada+US is becoming the common default.
Of course the problem with this system is that you need to worry about what plan the caller has. So if you want to be very sure that locals can call without paying long-distance rates it is still best to get a local number. But I think that in almost all cases the need for this has passed.
> I suspect that long-distance calls were legitimately quite expensive to provide at some point in the past
From the outset, what actually costs money is the (telephone) network. But people were often reluctant to pay the true cost of access to the network at first - so for a long period the providers charged for calls. After all if the average person receives 100+ minutes of incoming calls per month, but is only willing to pay you $15 for the network access which you want $25 for, you can take their $15 and then charge 10 cents per minute for calls to get the same net revenue...
In the US in particular the government regulators allowed operating companies to significantly overcharge for long distance in order to subsidise local calls. This creates market distortion which was judged worth it to facilitate widespread rollout of telephony. They probably should have reined it in much earlier, but hey, the basic idea worked.
Area Code 810 is the Thumb of Michigan, including some of central Michigan, so it's not all 8XX. Unsure how they draw the line, but 800 and 888 are the two that I see businesses use for toll free calling.
> In Germany the cellphone area code is just out of a range your provider has registered and if you move to a different provider, you typically move over your number.
Why would moving require a new provider/number? Are plans/numbers not portable in Europe?
In the USA, the number reflects the area it was issued. So my phone number matches suburban DC. If I move to California, everybody would know I lived in DC in the past. Kind of odd, I guess, but is a leftover from when cell homes didn’t exist and then when numbers weren’t portable across providers.
> Why would moving require a new provider/number? Are plans/numbers not portable in Europe?
They are portable in Europe (I said that in the second part of my comment), but it seemed like they weren’t in the US, because otherwise, the post is a bit strange. The author just tried every number from his area code to find the owner, when it is possible/likely that the owner has a completely different area code. That’s why I thought it might be that the current number always reflects the actual area code.
You're not misunderstanding anything, it was just a bit lucky that the person had their phone number issued in that city. If they moved, they'd take the number with them and this story wouldn't have worked out.
Ah, Americans don’t move around much. At least not any more. Can’t find the figure right now, but an astonishing % live within 10 minutes or so of wherever they grew up.
But that's exactly what they are saying. Numbers are just ported over to a different provider, so there's literally no certainty you can even pinpoint the provider they are using from a number. The prefix belonged to a provider, but you can move numbers as you move providers.
When I first got my plan / phone on the US east coast I was given the option to pick a number from anywhere in the country. I went with a fulsom county CA number and its come in really handy. I know to screen incoming calls that have the fulsom area code (always spam) and numbers that have the local area code where I live are actually legit.
In the UK cell numbers start with 07 and landline numbers start with 01. And there is no region encoded in a cell number, but landline numbers begin with an area code.
Not all the landline numbers start with 01, all the big cities and urban areas got moved into 02 to make space decades ago when there was concern we might run out of space.
Also, 03 is guaranteed to cost the same as 02 but has no specific geographic link, so it's often used for helplines, customer service, that sort of thing, and for people who want to have a landline (or multiple landlines) but do not want to reveal their location.
04, 05 and 06 are part of that roped off space we reserved in expectation of a need that's now unlikely to ever materialise, oh well. In the era when it was conceived people thought "Internet shopping" was a ludicrous idea and still imagined "Video calls" would be a thing you'd do as a telephone call somewhow - so what did they know.
07 as you said is where non-geographic mobiles live, as well as some other services at similar price points
08 is "free" or sometimes revenue sharing prefixes and the 09 prefix is where "premium" services live, you know "Chat live now to singles in your area".
In the olden days, if your cell number had a different area code from the place you were physically in, you'd get long-distance charges when calling a local number, but not when calling a number matching your area code.
In modern times however, the area code is largely irrelevant. You get assigned a number with the area code of the place you first opened your account, and then you can just keep that number forever if you want. I've had the same number for almost 20 years and I've had four different providers in that time. Porting a number between carriers has been a standardized process for a very long time.
Intuitively, I'd agree. But I looked it up and NYC doesn't even rank in the top 10 cities by geographic diversity.
What's interesting is Colorado Springs ranks #2. I'm guessing that's because the Air Force Academy is there, which would make sense because it draws people from all over the country.
Rank. City / % Born in state / Geo diversity index
There's also some social signaling here, like 415 is the original San Francisco area code – but if you got a number in the last few years it might be 628 which was added as 415 reached capacity.
This social signal predates cell phones. There was a bit about it in an episode of Seinfeld, “The Maid” (1998)
> The episode also featured the New York area code 646. When the 212 area code ran out of numbers, 646 was created. Elaine gets a new number with the 646 area code. She is not happy with the new number because she believes the area code makes it too long to dial. She is proved correct when attempting to give her number to a man in the park. Initially eager, he reads the number, asks if it is in New Jersey. Her response is, "No, it's just like 212 except they multiplied every number by 3…and added 1 to the middle number." He says he is already in a relationship and walks off.
Yeah some people put a lot of value on area codes. My wife was so proud when she got her first iPhone years ago because it was a 214 number (Dallas proper). There use to be posters around town saying “keep 972 out of 214” since 972 was associated with the smaller suburban areas just North of Dallas. I had an 817 number which was ft worth and basically an untouchable haha.
Was going to post the same thing. People forget that prior to cell phone number portability between carriers in late 2003, you basically got a new phone number when you moved or changed carriers. Hence much more of the “new phone, who dis?”
Now the comic is more like “where you lived in 2005 or when you first got a cell phone”.
Now that I have kids it’s an interesting signaling mechanism seeing which parents have local area codes and which ones have them from other parts of the country.
I have some distant family who moved from California to Idaho as part of a wider Conservative exodus. Some Idahoans aren't too keen, they see Californians as migrants who are driving up house prices etc. I don't believe there's any sense of irony on either side.
Anyway, they had to get new cellphone numbers because they'd get awful/no customer service if, say, they dropped their truck off for repairs and left a California number.
You can keep your number if you move. My number is from another state.
Also nowadays when you get a new line you can pick any area code, so they have become somewhat meaningless.
I wouldn't go that far. Area codes don't mean as much as they used to, but they are still a very strong association to the actual area. I would say that the majority of people I interact with in my area have a mobile number from the area code. And of those who don't, all of them are from out of state.
In Germany the cellphone area code is just out of a range your provider has registered and if you move to a different provider, you typically move over your number.