I still find it annoying

[unixronin]

...that at least 50% of the calls I receive on my cell phone that are not from cymrullewes are wrong numbers.  This is a symptom of the problem that there are no never-previously-issued phone numbers left any more, except in not-yet-in-use area codes.  All "new" phone numbers are recycled, and there's no way to globally purge or update all the old outdated records and Rolodex cards out there.

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Do you get charged for incoming calls, with your plan?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'm on a prepaid, and all airtime counts. But it's so stupid cheap (it's costing me about $5 a month) it's hardly worth the bother of calling customer service over a ten-second wrong-number call. It's just irritating that I'm still getting calls for the previous owner of a phone number I've had for a year and a half.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Unless I recognized the number, I just let it go to voicemail. If it's that important, they'll leave a message; if it's a wrong number, they'll learn that from my voicemail greeting.

[guppiecat]

If it's a smart phone, you can install call-block software that does either black or whitelisting.

It's saved me many times.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Not really, it's pretty much a basic phone. But even so, I don't think I ever get wrong-number calls from the same number twice, so it wouldn't really help very much.

[fatcook.livejournal.com]

I'm on pre-paid too. Most of mine seem to come from the 313 area and I'm in 602. I've have the same number for 5 years.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

This could be easily solved if the TelCos gave away the meta-data on the Internet (the directory). Alas, they sell that, so don't hold your breath waiting for the obvious solution.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

They wouldn't even really have to give away the metadata. Phone numbers are completely "soft" these days anyway, and I think all major landline phone companies now offer reasonably-priced flat-rate billing plans with unlimited calling and no additional long distance charges. So the obvious next step is to break the mapping of area codes to geographic regions and say, "OK, we have this flat ten-digit number space, of which these prefixes are reserved and all the rest is freely usable. This number is yours FOREVER. Wherever you move within the North American continent, you can take it with you."

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Um, that's already been done. It's called "a cell phone" or ... a "social security number".

What I meant was "call by name" instead of "call by number" - our trouble is that the directories are all static, especially the one in your cell phone or computer address book. I'm told that the Plaxo.com system attempts to deal with this - why shouldn't I be able to update my entry in your address book? Or at least have your address book reference me by a central directory which I update?

There are, of course, privacy issues ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

What I meant was "call by name" instead of "call by number" -

Yes, I figured. My point is that if all phone numbers are portable, not just cell numbers, then phone numbers can be static, which means call-by-name becomes a much simpler problem (though disambiguation is still an issue). The next step is then to virtualize that number across all the possible ways of contacting you ... And so on.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

That's one of the reasons I wanted a cell phone that's unrestricted and can run programs to intercept non-whitelisted callers and give them the "are you really human and do you want to talk to me..." blah blah.

I just had some dumbass company send me a bill then sic a robot on me on the same day. I'm tempted to pay enough of it to stop collections.