On Nov 15, 8:49 pm, Adrian wrote:
On Nov 14, 6:04 pm, Pyromancer
wrote:

Why do people want to only dial part of the number? Why not just dial
the whole thing and be sure it will work from anywhere in the UK,
including mobiles?

Back in the days of electro-mechanical exchange switching and physical
connections number-shortening may have made sense, but surely by now
it's an anachronism?

If I had to take a guess, I would say that, for some countries,
telephone area codes will dissappear with a few decades. In the age
of mobile telephones and VoIP they are becoming increasingly
anachronistic.

Example: I have numbers relating to Bognor Regis, Edinburgh, Leeds,
Portsmouth, Anaheim, Beverly Hills and Reno. Very few of them connect
to telephones in the locations indicated!

Adrian

The US (or more precisely those countries participating in the North
American Numbering Plan) is an interesting case to look at.

All numbers there are stuck in being in the format (xxx) xxx xxxx,
with the first three digits being the area code. But of course there's
a massive demand for numbers as people get second lines and cell phone
numbers also exist within this numbering plan too.

So the initial solution was to split a single area code into two areas
and hence two area codes, so a group of people in one of the two areas
would then have a new area code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_plan

But this was unpopular exactly because peoples area codes changes, so
eventually it was agreed to overlay new area codes on top of old area
codes - i.e. any particular place could be covered by two (or more)
area codes. This thus means that anyone dialling a number on another
area code - even if it's the house next door - would have to dial a 10-
digit number. And so as to ensure a level playing field between
different telecom companies, the FCC has made it compulsory for 10-
digit dialling even for local numbers in areas where there is an
overlay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_plan

A bit of an undignified solution, not helped by the inflexible NANP
rules which mean all numbers are in the (xxx) xxx xxxx format. The
other issue of course is that there's more people - both the UK and
the NANP are fundamentally 10-digit systems, but the US alone has a
population of 300 million, compared to the UK's 60 million.

But perhaps it matters less now that more and more people are using
cell phones and hence dialling the whole number, including the area
code (though I'm unclear of whether this is necessarily the case with
all US cellular networks- an internet search didn't immediately reveal
the answer to that).