On the flip side, how are we doing with SSN's, which are also 10 digits?
It's worse than that, too, because those first three digits encode the issuing office, and there are not 999 issuing offices. Also, I know there is a theoretical premise built into the system that no social security number will ever be re-issued. (Ten digits probably seemed like plenty when the system was set up.) Whether that is actually honored any more, I don't know.
For "individuals", use the remaining 10 digits to assign a life-long phone number that goes with them no matter where they move ... it's like a hostname, mapping to an underlying "circuit" (like a CDMA phone's ESN). That underlying location could even change during the day ("when I'm at home, park my personal phone number at my house phone; when I'm on the road, park it at my cell phone; etc."). You'd just need to have some sort of service (comparable to a dynamic routing protocol) that tells you where a given individual number is currently parked. And, most people would probably just leave it at their cell phone all the time. Plus, you could have multiple individuals parked at the same circuit (everyone within a family, for example, parked at the same home landline phone).
Exactly such a system has been proposed at various times. Number portability is a baby-step along the way. Whether it'll actually ever get implemented in a form like that remains to be seen.
You could say that "10 digits is a lot to memorize for an individual, the current scheme means you only have to memorize 7 digits, which is right in the middle of the 5-9 digit range that is based on psychology data"... except that's not really relevant anymore because memorizing phone numbers is much less common than it used to be. Today, lots of people don't even know each other's phone numbers, they just have them programmed into their handset, and only ever see the person's name and the type of number (that person's cell phone, that person's home phone, that person's work phone, etc.). For individuals, my scheme sort of depends upon that -- you only ever know an individual's number when you first acquire it, and program it into whatever you use for a contacts list.
Exactly. There's basically two classes of phone numbers these days — ones you have to look up anyway, and ones you have on some form of memorized speed-dial.
One would certainly like to HOPE that when the time comes, instead of just patching the system, people would think carefully about the problem and completely revamp it in a single step calculated to maximize functionality and user-perceived backwards compatibility while minimizing disruption of services. But that's not an easy thing to do, and real-world experience says we'll get another band-aid patch and continuation of the trickle of incremental improvements. One thing I expect to see happen possibly sooner than other changes is to see the concept of "long distance" tolls just completely go away. Possibly even for international calls. Anywhere on the planet for one flat rate.
(As a side note, it boggles me that people have difficulty memorizing more than nine digits. I routinely memorize my 19 [total] digit credit/debit card numbers [23 if you count expiry date], and I used to have the value of pi memorized to 26 places when I was using it regularly. But I already know I'm an edge case.)
no subject
Exactly such a system has been proposed at various times. Number portability is a baby-step along the way. Whether it'll actually ever get implemented in a form like that remains to be seen.
Exactly. There's basically two classes of phone numbers these days — ones you have to look up anyway, and ones you have on some form of memorized speed-dial.
One would certainly like to HOPE that when the time comes, instead of just patching the system, people would think carefully about the problem and completely revamp it in a single step calculated to maximize functionality and user-perceived backwards compatibility while minimizing disruption of services. But that's not an easy thing to do, and real-world experience says we'll get another band-aid patch and continuation of the trickle of incremental improvements. One thing I expect to see happen possibly sooner than other changes is to see the concept of "long distance" tolls just completely go away. Possibly even for international calls. Anywhere on the planet for one flat rate.
(As a side note, it boggles me that people have difficulty memorizing more than nine digits. I routinely memorize my 19 [total] digit credit/debit card numbers [23 if you count expiry date], and I used to have the value of pi memorized to 26 places when I was using it regularly. But I already know I'm an edge case.)