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.
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.
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".
So the tattoo might be the better choice.
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.
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.
I have no idea if he was given an option but our numbers were sequential. X, X+1, and X+2.
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.
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.
Any idea if the premium was due to technical limitations or just to milk the customers?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same in Poland.
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.
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".
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.
I have an old utah number that I've taken around to several states and I always get fun conversations when people ask what I did there.
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.
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
01. Las Vegas / 25.3% / 82.7
02. Colorado Springs / 33.8% / 80.1
03. Seattle / 38.1% / 79.3
04. Washington, D.C. / 36.2% / 78.8
05. Denver / 41.1% / 77.4
06. Portland / 39.1% / 77.3
07. Mesa / 38.8% / 77.2
08. Phoenix / 40.6% / 77.2
09. Virginia Beach / 39.8% / 77.0
10. San Francisco / 40.1% / 76.8
11. Charlotte / 41.3% / 76.4
12. Boston / 43.7% / 76.1
13. San Diego / 45.5% / 74.8
14. Tucson / 45.8% / 74.2
15. Raleigh / 47.2% / 72.5
16. Oakland / 48.2% / 72.1
17. Los Angeles / 45.6% / 71.8
18. New York / 48.4% / 71.1
19. San Jose / 47.3% / 69.8
20. Jacksonville / 50.6% / 69.8
21. Nashville / 51.8% / 68.8
22. Austin / 53.3% / 68.3
23. Minneapolis / 51.9% / 68.0
24. Atlanta / 51.3% / 67.7
25. Houston / 51.9% / 67.7
26. Albuquerque / 53.4% / 67.6
27. Tulsa / 54.5% / 66.2
28. Dallas / 55.0% / 64.9
29. Kansas City / 54.4% / 64.8
30. Oklahoma City / 56.8% / 64.3
31. Fort Worth / 57.5% / 63.8
32. Long Beach / 56.9% / 63.6
33. Chicago / 59.5% / 61.9
34. Sacramento / 59.5% / 61.9
35. El Paso / 61.9% / 61.9
36. Miami / 29.8% / 61.2
37. Omaha / 59.3% / 61.1
38. Wichita / 63.7% / 57.0
39. Columbus / 64.5% / 56.5
40. San Antonio / 65.5% / 54.9
41. Milwaukee / 65.7% / 54.5
42. Fresno / 66.2% / 53.6
43. Indianapolis / 66.5% / 53.6
44. Memphis / 65.9% / 52.8
45. Philadelphia / 67.9% / 52.3
46. Baltimore / 67.6% / 52.1
47. Louisville / 70.4% / 48.8
48. New Orleans / 70.9% / 47.8
49. Cleveland / 73.1% / 45.0
50. Detroit / 74.5% / 42.4
Source: scraped from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-ranks... (from 2016, but probably still about the same)
Not sure how it’s done. Maybe there’s a code system.
Also for the biggest service provider, it always displays Ahmedabad as the city for some reason.
> 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.
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.
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.