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Why is it that the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), under the country code +1, covers more than just one country (i.e. not just the US but also Canada, Bermuda, and many Caribbean countries/territories), while other national telephone numbering plans only cover one country each (with exceptions in the past like Andorra and Monaco vis-a-vis France, Liechtenstein vis-a-vis Switzerland, and San Marino vis-a-vis Italy)?
Putting it another way, for example, why is there no unified numbering plan similar to the NANP for much or all of Europe, or Australia and New Zealand and some Pacific islands, or Brazil/Argentina/Uruguay/Paraguay, or South Africa plus other Southern African countries?
No idea...but why do numbers always start with '555' in American movies? lol
Because those have never been assigned as real numbers. Going back to the days when phone numbers had word prefixes with the first two letters dialed (EVergreen-2 corresponded to 382, followed by four numerals, written and dialed as EV2-3456), there were no mnenomic words beginning with JKL as the first two letters. Period movies depicting that era use KLondike as the telephone number prefix, but KLondike was never used for actuall numbers, so the 55 prefix remained in limbo. The telephone company reserved 555 as a null prefix, which they could employ in the future as needed for phone company technical purposes, but as far as i know, they never did.
For reasons of their own, picture studios never display telephone or car license numbers that could possibly correspond to any real person's number. But it screams phony, and if I were were a film producer, I'd just get a real phone number installed or car registered in my mane, and just use that number, to avoid stepping on the toes of any unwitting citizen. They also avoid using addresses that might be real, and people always have house numbers like 1297, because city blocks start with 1201 and the numbers never progress up that high before a new block number starts with 1301. Usually, such numbers occur only in rural Midwestern areas, where roads cross on one-mile grids, and the full address number reflects a position along a section line.
Russia and Kazakhstan share a dialing code (7), which of course is a legacy of the USSR. For some reason Kazakhstan never got around to acquiring its own code, as all other ex-USSR republics did.
No idea...but why do numbers always start with '555' in American movies? lol
Because a good percentage of Americans will actually spend the energy to call up phone numbers that they see in those movies. So if it's a number to an actual business or residence, they'll unwittingly get 1,000s of calls a day.
Somebody in Wake Forest, North Carolina accidentally got a very interesting phone number, The International System of Units has defined one second of time as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of the cesium-133 atom. The poor guy had the phone number 919-263-1770 and started getting phone calls from bored and/or inebriated scientists saying "Hey, dude, cool number", and had it changed. I don't know if anybody has that number now, dial it and see.
Some more useless trivia. Back in the days of rotary phones, it would take much longer to spin an 8, 9, or zero and wait for the dial to slowly spin back, than it would to quickly spin a 1, 2, or 3. For this reason, the Bell company originally assigned the lowest numbered area codes containing combinations of the numerals 1, 2, and 3, to the very largest metropolitan cities which got the highest volume of calls. Places like Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, Yukon, Newfoundland, etc. which got much less calling volume, were stuck with area codes containing combinations of 8, 9, and 0 which were laborious to dial. (Back then, Phoenix 612 and Las Vegas 702 were much smaller cities than today).
There's also a reason why, until recent years, ALL North American area codes had either Zero or One as their middle digit. The numerals Zero and One on either a dial or keypad, did NOT correspond to any letters of the alphabet. And all local prefixes HAD TO spell out the first 2 letters of a word or proper name. Therefore, as soon as a caller reached the second digit, the switching apparatus would automatically know whether a local or a long-distance call was starting to be dialed. If the second digit was anything other than Zero or One, the switching apparatus would know that a local call was starting to be dialed, and not a distant, area coded call. Eventually upon the invention and growth of cellphone use, and the doubling of the North American population, all available area code combinations were exhausted, and now ANY middle-digit can be used in area codes.
Last edited by slowlane3; 01-10-2014 at 07:57 PM..
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