This explains using such a bank. You want to cover as many prefixes as possible and you can’t match area codes with traditional sms services.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/erratarob.bsky.social [2] https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-far...
I actually did see the tweet in full it turns out. It's just that there's not much content so i figured "oh it's one of those twitter thread chains i can't read".
Still not gonna help if you have cookies disabled because of the rate limiting, but hey.
SO much value in being able to root out garbage sales calls
https://xcancel.com/ErrataRob/status/1970586083374112784
With the additional advantage of giving you a view more like threadreader.app, or something. Without having to install anything.
Here in the UK, all landline residential numbers start with an area code that starts 02 for London and 01 for the rest of the coountry (eg 020 for London and 0114 for Sheffield).
Mobile numbers here all start 07 here, and the first 5 digits are carrier specific - but so many people port their numbers that it becomes meaningless pretty quickly. But years ago you could spot a number an know what provider the caller was on.
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Are residential and mobile numbers similar in the States?
It was very shocking to me how many minutes cell phone plans had in the US when I moved there (it was ... a while ago) compared to France.
But also: in the US, calling someone on their cell cost the same as calling someone on a land line. In France, calling someone on their cell from a land line was something like 4x more per minute.
Really, the structure of phone costs (both land and cell) in the US was quite different.
Not the good old days of spending money to browse the internet at 28.8kbps.
IIRC, we had to pay for any kind of use on a cell phone use (both to make and receive calls), which is probably stemmed from them being considered premium devices when they were introduced, with a lot of expensive fixed infrastructure you'd use no matter the direction of the call.
02 dialling codes are used in more than just London; Northern Ireland and Coventry phone numers start with 02 for example.
Then London changed to 081/071, then all changed to 01xxx (eg 0564 to 01564, 081 to 0181), then finally London, Southampton, Belfast and a few others mixed to 02x and 8 digits.
03 became national geographic numbers and things like 0345 and 0500 were phased out, 0800 remained free but not always with mobiles, 0845 was “local” but was basically premium, 0870 was even more, 0898 was super premium etc
But as phones took off in the 00s everyone just had 07 with 9 digits. Not sure when that will fill up, but it feels like a billion numbers is enough for now.
The UK (and Australia) set up a separate prefix for mobile calls. They were more expensive to call. You also knew if you could text someone because it was a mobile number.
The US had analog cell phones for longer and they were introduced to be in the same area code so counted as a "local" call (vs "long distance") for anyone calling that number. The receiver also paid to receive that call, originally.
I honestly don't know how landlines are charged now. It's been probably 20 years since I've had one. Some cheaper cell phone plans might have limited minutes but it's way more common to have unlimited talk and text to any US domestic number (landline or cell).
Oh we had 1800 that were "toll free" meaning they didn't incur long distance charges, originally but this doesn't really apply now. Also, they ran out of 1800 numbers so pretty much anything 18xx is a toll free number.
Note the 1 in front too. That's also a US thing. It technically indicates you're making a "long distance" call. More specifically, you're specifying an area code.e Modern smartphones don't generally require you to type in the 1. Old phones did.
So if you were on a 718 number and call someone else on a 718 number, you could just use the 7 digits of their number. This isn't something people really do anymore. But if you had to call a 646 number you'd put in 1-646-123-4567 back in the day.
By the way, the cell phone numbers being in a given area code explains this joke [1].
Oh the UK/Australia system had its issues too, like it mattered if you were calling from Vodafone to another Vodafone user or if it was an Orange or BT cutstomer because you were charged differently and it could count against different free minutes pools. And you really had no way of knowing.
I don't believe the US had that kind of issue or, they did, it was so long ago that nobody remembers.
There is still a similar issue of not knowing whether an area code is for another country in the North American Numbering Plan. It’s fairly common for me to see an unfamiliar number and be unsure whether it’s from the US or Canada, for instance, without additional context.
In old days the numbers were distinct but these days the overview just says "mostly mobile" or "mostly landline": https://digst.dk/media/x3tmvqsl/nummerplan_2020_farver.pdf
Local number has become an spam signifier for me