Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number | Hacker News Reader

Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

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Very fun article, thanks for sharing :)

I think the current title ‘You could own a 555-XXXX phone number but Verizon’s charged you $2,500 to use it’ doesn’t capture how bad the deal was —- here’s the relevant quote from the article

> Verizon was notorious for charging high fees to establish service to 555 numbers, charging $2,500 for each area code that you wanted your 555 number to be routed in.

This is the craziest part of the whole article - imagine you wanted to own something like "555-FOOD" - to have this vanity number work in every area code, you'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars (annually?) if you used Verizon to route the calls

Well, yes? At the end of the day that requires Verizon to provision that number in every single area code, which historically are all separate little domains.

It's kind of like complaining that if you want to have foobar.tld for every top-level domain, you have to fork out money to every TLD registrar to make it possible.

But there is nothing different about 555 numbers than any other, and Verizon certainly doesn’t charge $2500 for a normal number.

The point is you don’t have to dial an area code with the 555.

555-abcd, sans area code, would just work and route to you no matter where (in the USA) a caller was calling from.

Therefore it is equivalent to having that number in every area code.

Now there is a good chance you aren’t old enough to know/remember this, but people in the US didn’t have to dial an area code (and occasionally nearby area codes) when calling people in their own area code. In the era of land lines this was the norm.

You paid a lot of money per minute to call people “long distance” in other area codes.

Now it’s absolutely normal and routine to dial with an area code, in large part because people’s numbers follow them around and there is no reason to think someone geographically near you is in the same area code.

Paying X per area code is justified, nobody is arguing against that.

Paying $2500 per area code is unreasonable, as, like I said, there is nothing inherently special about 206-555-1234 vs 206-689-5312.

And as the other poster said, there is.

Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?

I found the article light on details about what exactly needs to happen and why Verizon charges the fee. Would Verizon charge 2,500$ for me to get a 1 area code 555 number for my cell phone for instance? For multiple area codes, why is it difficult to route more than one number to a secondary number ? Is it passing along the origin area code data that requires different hardware or software than normal numbers ? Etc …

What, exactly, is difficult and expensive to maintain about a 555 number compared to any other?

Let's be real, we're all tech engineers here. Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. There's nothing at all special about maintaining one mapping vs another.

Iirc the article mentioned that 555 numbers used to be reserved for internal use, so my hypothesis is that implementing external 555 numbers likely required some sort of retrofit.

But I don’t have any domain knowledge here, so this is really just a guess

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop.

All I know about telecoms comes from Wikipedia, but that makes no sense. Why would the technology that determines where to route your call be related to the protocol used to transfer data long distances?

(Also the Verizon quote is from 2003.)

Telephony backbones are, for the most part, just SIP. When I say they’re IP based I mean they’re not old school POTS loops anymore.

It might have cost 2500 per area code when that was a requirement and you had to set these up loops up manually across longer distances, but nowadays it literally is just going to be a mapping in a computer, like any other.

As I said, you paid per minute long distance charges to call another area code. A 555 number would not be long distance. Therefore they charged up front.

I have lived and worked in places where you only have to dial 4 numbers because there is only one exchange! Or five numbers when there are two.

Thanks for filling in the gaps in my explanation. Sigh, I feel old...

Sounds cheap to me to be honest.

so, cheaper than a premium domain name.

Joke's on them, I registered for Klondike-5.

Likely because large movies were already willing to pay for such...

I've never tried to call a 555 num from a movie because it was "common knowledge" that they were fake...

I had NO idea that you could actually call one....

The movies never paid Verizon for that. They're just numbers that don't go anywhere

As far as I know the only fake range these days is 555-0000 thru 555-0199. Everything else is assignable.

Well, could you, or were they just reserved? That's still not clear to me. I guess I'll find out, next time I need to bust some ghosts.

555-1212 is free directory assistance, for example.

411.

I wonder if POPCORN for time still works...

(back in the day you could walk up to any payphone and dial POPCORN and it would give you the current time)

in the 80s while were were BBS-ing, we used to have a challenge of calling 411 (information) and the challenge was social engineering how long you could keep the OP on the phone and how much info you could get out of them, like where is your call center, tell me about it, tell me about you... blah blah...

2600 type stuff... we were 13 years old. Captain crunch is my hero.

Every time I see a 555 number in a movie, I'm reminded that it's a movie and am dropped out of immersion.

So what if the movies use a real number? They could just sign up for a number, use it, and no harm done.

Or just use 867-5309. Wherever that number goes, the person there is expecting it.

Better Call Saul had real phone numbers which you can call and get a little prerecorded clip which ties into the show. Almost every time these numbers were not a main focus of the single shot they appeared in - most people wouldn't even notice them.

Short list:

Need an Attorney? Better Call Saul! (505) 503-4455

Need a Will? Call McGill! (505) 842-5662

Retirement Funds Drained? Call Davis & Main! (505) 242-7700

Want a Gangster who’s macho? You got Nacho! (505) 242-6087

Tips are Frail? Go to Day Spa & Nail! (505) 842-5325

For what its worth, Scrubs did put a real number in one of their episodes. They had a real phone that went around being answered by cast & crew and everyone had a blast. They remember it quite fondly.

2000s were a different time.

Accidentally had my (desk) phone number go out on a TV program which typically gets around 100k viewers (was burnt into a screen in the background of an interview) earlier this year. Very disappointed than nobody phoned it.

Same. My favorite geezer hacker/heist movie, Sneakers, drops a realistic San Francisco phone number (415 area code) near the end. I always wondered who would pick up if dialed...

> Or just use 867-5309. Wherever that number goes, the person there is expecting it.

As soon as everyone switched to all use 867-5309 you'd have the exact same problem. You'd learn to recognize it immediately and all immersion would be lost.

I agree it's annoying and the whole fake phone number thing should die. For all the money they waste making and advertising movies and TV shows they can fork over the money for a phone line in the appropriate area code and if people call it they can harvest the cell phone numbers for spam and market research or something.

> Every time I see a 555 number in a movie, I'm reminded that it's a movie and am dropped out of immersion.

What about a cut? A camera zoom? A title screen? Sub-titles? I am intrigued about how you experience films.

I am intrigued about how you experience films... or books for that matter. If all you see is black and white letters, does this mean you could never experience immersion in the story?

I experience immersion in books. What drops me out of immersion is misspellings. I remember one which was a good story, but about 90% of the pages had at least one misspelling. It's like hitting a pothole when you're driving.

Book misspellings have changed over the years. Since people use spell checkers now, they are of the form:

    He arrived at the top of the stairs painting heavily.

Yes, that's an actual example :-)

With films, I drop out of immersion when seeing things like reflections of the camera crew, anachronisms, etc.

It's slightly individual, e.g. some may pick up on misspellings in books (or anachronisms or mismatching sound in video) more easily than others, but my theory is whenever something concerns the story or requires any effort to determine whether it concerns the story or not it breaks immersion.

Misspellings in books, foreign objects or people in a show or film, obviously fake phone numbers and things like that fall into that category.

On the other hand, things like paper quality or font choice (and lens angles, cuts, video resolution, color) tend to not break immersion if the story is right.

I am a filmmaker. I went to film school. Maybe that has something to do with it?

I cannot recommend enough a book called In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch.

Ah, then there's no need to be intrigued by how WalterBright experiences films. Just remember how you experienced films before you went to film school, or remember how you experience a book or a cartoon (unless you went to book or cartoon school too I guess).

Scenes and cuts, like letters on paper, are the medium. A phone number OTOH is part of the story. Immersion is broken by a badly told story, not the medium.

Going to film school would likely ruin movies for me, as I'd see the man behind the curtain. I used to watch the "making of ..." bonus features, until I realized they'd ruin the movie.

It's like that for video games for me. I used to program them for a job when I was in college. Ever since, when I see a video game, I don't see the game so much as how it is constructed and programmed.

Thanks. This is a good point. I don’t remember experiencing films that way. I actually struggled to even follow storylines in films when I was younger, so I don’t think I ever got immersed as described.

Or a lens flare for that matter

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

We see real life through a lens, we don't see real life with 555 numbers

You absolutely do NOT see real life through a lens. This is one of the first things you learn in film school.

It's literally impossible to see without a lens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_(anatomy)

You know what would be cool? If a movie bought a zero day and put it in. Haha! It would be neat if the exploit stayed undiscovered till release.

They might get sued unless they ensure that it's patched before release, though.

I experience the immersion drop as well. However, a fake area code for a number registered by the production can have the same effect if it doesn’t match the city or character in the scene. The older you get, the more of them you know. :)

If you don’t use an area code in the shot (looks natural, especially in productions set in the past or when handwritten), you really need a fake number because a production is not going to be able to scoop up that number for every area code. Dozens or hundreds of random people will end up being harassed.

Let's set more movies in the UK, there's various ranges to choose from (expand the Notes section at the top):

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/inform...

Mr. Robot had real phone numbers which were part of the ARG.

> Mr. Robot had real phone numbers

And even real IP addresses. :) The attention to detail in the show was something else.

As an aside, loved when shows would acquire a real number to use, the best being CALL-TUR(K) from Scrubs

“I’ll always dial the ‘k’ for you”

Is there also an overview of all 555-XXXX phone numbers used in movies and what they are for? 555-0001 is used in Die Hard With a Vengeance for instance. Would be fun to see if any of the numbers are used more or less often.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveFiveFive (nsfw) has a good list

"Computers Are Bad" wrote more about the history of this: https://computer.rip/2021-02-20-555-500-710-etc.html

I grew up Austin, off the top of my head I remember (512) 485-5555 for Time Warner Cable and (512) 459-2222 for Gatti’s Pizza. I have no use for remembering these phone numbers anymore but I’ll probably never forget them.

Real cheese, real hot. Real taste is what we got!

Gatti's nostalgia will never be useless.

I wonder how many websites / applications would break or error if a user tried to enter a valid 555 number.

I have a valid phone number that ends in 0000 that I got multiple decades ago.

There are many websites where I enter my phone number and it's rejected. Sometimes programmers are too clever for their own good.

A few do that I've tried signing up for services with. Not a lot though.

These numbers can be used in some test situations where you want to eliminate the possibility of accidentally sending SMS or calling someone. 555-01xx is best but it seems any 555 might work.

555 is also used in TV shows when the script requires a phone number to be read out.

I got a phone number issued in ireland a few years back, dublin number, starting with 555... a lot of the time people think it's fake, but it's. Areal life number. Fun to give out, if someone is looking for a landline. Get some odd looks.

Sierra On-Line used 555-XXXX in many of their adventure games. I remember 555-6969 from Leisure Suit Larry 1 :)

Only vaguely related, here's the Peanuts comic strip that did not use a 555 number, resulting in people calling it looking for Snoopy: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1965/08/15

The number in question belonged to Peanuts TV Special producer Lee Mendelson, though of course the area code was omitted and so many other random families received calls.

When looking at the historical list of these numbers, a massive percentage of them were issued to individuals in Maryland (area codes 410/301.) What was going on there?

Perhaps people seeking a number that would span the area codes of MD, VA and DC?

This title is really poor.

It was $2500 per area code you connect to, and no longer offered. Not exactly something to write home about.

> no longer offered

The title says "charged", not "charges".

Re the per area code, I agree, it was also my first thought, but I can't think of any way the poster could have concisely included that in the title

None of the cool kids say “area code,” they’re NPAs.

Sorry, but I have a lingering attachment to telco industry acronyms. Let me tell you about my DNIS[1].

[1] pronounced dee-nis.

Always fun troubleshooting analog DID (FXO) lines that supported DNIS

“You could own” is present tense. Perhaps “could have” would be better?

"Could" can be both the conditional present tense or preterite tense in English (at least AmE). It's ambiguous.

See: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/could#Verb

The point I was attempting to make is that the usage is incorrect and misleading in this context. The way the title is worded is indeed the past tense usage.

The point the parent was making is that it is not incorrect or misleading, just ambiguous. And even then, it’s ambiguous only if you leave out the second clause.

“I could have a banana” has two perfectly correct meanings: it is possible for me to have a banana right now depending on some factor (conditional), or I had the possibility to have a banana in the past (preterite).

A preterite in the second clause eliminates the possibility of a present conditional in the first one.

Don't you need to add another verb for “I could have a banana” to work as past tense?

E.g. "I could have eaten" or "I could have had"

Edit: Oh wait, now I see it. Something like "I knew I could have a banana if I got hungry."

The internet has this kind of stuff too. Addresses "reserved for documentation" by IANA / IETF. I don't remember seeing them mentioned on-screen. I guess it's easy enough to register ghostbusters (dot) info or whatever.

example.com https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc2606/ 192.0.2.55 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc5737/

There must be layers upon layers of old special-case routing code in telco switches that makes it really hard to just start issuing those old 555 directory numbers to subscribers.

Related: Here’s a number many wish they didn’t have.

867-5309 [0]

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/867-5309-jenny/

What does it mean that many wish they didn't have it? How do multiple have the same number?

Edit: And in case you thought I misinterpreted him the article says "The biggest complaints about the new phone exchange come from Nina Clemente '03 and Jahanaz Mirza '03, the two students with the telephone number 867-5309."

Anyway if I had that number I would try to sell it to only fans or something like that lmao.

It is only seven digits, so it doesn't start with a 3-digit area code. In the past, seven digit phone numbers in the United States would just default to whatever area code you were calling from. Now we need to enter all ten digits, area code included, due to mobile phones and such. That number could, and does, exist for many US area codes.

> How do multiple have the same number?

Up to 335 people have that number [1].

[1] https://www.twilio.com/docs/glossary/north-american-area-cod...

Conan O'Brien once introduced a running gag with the explanation that if he mentioned a fake website on the air, the network (NBC) was obligated to purchase and operate that website and it had better not exist already. (You could hear them mentioning "FaceSpace" on Law & Order sometimes.)

Conan decided that he was gonna make the most of mentioning a fake website, so he had them pick up HornyManatee.com, and for the next several months/years, the show developed "Horny Manatee" bits to show on the website and on the air.

I love how it isn’t until the third paragraph that the post mentions what country 555-XXXX numbers are relevant to.

This is the World Wide Web folks, not the USA web. The whole blog and offering seems US centric, to the point where I’m assuming it might not work very well at all for people outside of the North American Numbering plan area. We wouldn’t know because they seem to assume that the only people who are going to see this site live in the US, and phone numbers all need to have 9 digits.

Ok, a couple of down votes on this. I’m curious why. I was born and have lived almost all of my life in the US. I get tired of provincial web sites assuming that any random person who stumbles upon it will only be from the US, or even more insane, just from the local area. ( e.g. a restaurant site which just has a street address, or a newspaper site which assumes I know which Springfield it’s about)

The 555 is a common trope in US movies and TV shows[0]. I always thought those are non-assignable in the US (obviously I was wrong), but it's fair to assume this trope to be well known.

If you didn't know that, you're one of today's lucky 10000 :)

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FiveFiveFive

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

It talks about NANPA, so wouldn't it be more accurate to say "what continent" rather than "what country"? The NA stands for North American.

The Ghostbusters still didn’t clue you in?

This seems to be the site for the organization with the only one in use that isn't a redirect. https://www.eftps.gov

I wonder how they decided to use that 555 number. They had to know the connotation 555 numbers had, it somewhat makes their site look like some scam or parody. If they were willing to use one anyways why not something like 800-555-5555? Or anything easier to remember than 3453?

If you look at a telephone keypad with letters, 3453 can be mapped to FILE. So the number would be 555-FILE (which would be a reasonable mnemonic for something to do with taxes).

A good thought. It made me wonder if they used to advertise like that but stopped as that style of phone has all but vanished. From 2005-2010, they used 800-555-8778. In 2011, they used 800-555-4477, and then switched to 3453 in 2012.

In none of the years from 2012-2015 did they advertise on the homepage with 555-file, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone originally did pick that number for that reason and after they decided against advertising with it they stuck with the number.

What a waste of ten minutes this was.

my Android smartphone and iPad have letters on the number pad.

I honestly can't remember the last time I used the dialer. I either call a contact or copy/paste a number.

I peeked through the historically reserved numbers list, and there was a surprising number of what looked like individuals listed in there. Of the 10,000 numbers available in 555 prefix, most of them seemed to be individuals. I wonder what the story was there... Were people just doing it because they could contact the NANPA and ask for one?

I assumed individual professionals, things like an agent or a lawyer. Particularly as I saw an example where several different names redirected to the same number.

Any idea what the second column is? It's labeled "CL" with the possible responses of L, N, R, or D. R seems to be reserved, D in dispute but L and N I can't place.

Interesting that '555-5555' is historically listed as 'IN DISPUTE'. It was well-known in the 1980s and 1990s that if you hit 0 to have an operator dial a call for you (for example to an ANI demo or other target known to use ANI), an ANI Failure would result and the output would be: area code + 555-5555.

It is now obvious to me why mr Bundy wanted to have 555-SHOE for his hot line to dr shoe. Such a lovely family he had there.

Just waiting for the .timer TLD so someone can get 555.timer

I remember also that some 555-xxxx number is what you can dial to get your ANI, but maybe that is from ages ago. Or somehow, this number always keeps changing because they don't want you to use it?

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