New area code to pop up in 2020
Bad enough to live in the 450. Worse to live in the 579. But soon some people will be in the outer darkness, living in the 354, since we need an ever‑growing pool of numbers.
Wondering about the logic here: we have a constantly growing population, but the surge when people had landlines and mobiles and pagers and fax machines must have subsided by now. Most people I know have just one number. Most offices except for medical ones have phased out the fax. A lot of numbers must have returned to the pool with trends like that, but I guess a family of four will have four separate numbers, now that even little kids have their own phones.
Ephraim 12:10 on 2019-01-19 Permalink
Honestly, the overlays were a stupid idea. They should have expanded the pools by creating 10 area codes per area… 5140 through 5149, but that would have meant updating the whole system at one time, instead of patchwork. Of course they managed to do that when they moved from area codes requiring a 0 or 1 as the second digit.
But there is a large need for numbers. I have a virtual number for my virtual fax line (I pay $36 a year to have a fax to PDF gateway for my business). I have a virtual number that I can give out publicly, a number that I can cancel and have reissued in 10 minutes). I have a virtual Toronto number for my VOIP while on vacation the company issued me a number, I don’t even know it… but they automatically issued it. And of course gateways into SMS all need numbers. Oh and since Bell uses the DMS system as extensions, so if a business wants 300 phones in an office that’s 300 phone numbers.
And of course, dead phone numbers…. advertised phone numbers that get too many fake calls for someone to want the number, like 867-5309 or a phone number ending in 1418 which on a DMS system, if someone forgets to dial 9 for an outside line, would ring when someone dialled Quebec city.