Telecom Thursday–What’s a phone number?
Starting a series to dive into the particularities and (often) absurdities of the telecom industry in North America.
Quick history of phone numbers
Phone numbers began as a way to identify an intended recipient of a call by a caller to a switch operator. They were typically a memorable phrase pertaining to one’s location followed by a number. The first two letters of the phrase would pertain to two numbers. That phrase was known as the “telephone exchange name” and was a reference to the caller’s central office–basically, the location of their telephone switch. This is why letters are a feature on a phone’s dial pad.
An example involves my favorite movie of all time, Translyvania 6–5000. It’s title was a play on a song by Glen Miller Band “PEnnslyvania 6–5000” which was NYC Hotel Pennslyvania’s old telephone exchange: PE6–5000. It would be dialed as: 736–5000.
When long-distance dialing went direct, phone companies created area codes (since a switch operator in Ohio wouldn’t be able to clarify with caller that Pennsylvania 6–5000 was the hotel in NYC and not some place in Pennsylvania) and all phone numbers were made numerical by the Bell System.
How phone numbers worked 20 years ago
Before DSL and cell phones, you had a telephone line–a tangible piece of wire connecting your phone to nearby phone lines. This telephone line was assigned a single phone number. If you wanted more than one number, you needed another piece of wire.
Remember party lines? I’ll get into those in another post.
Your carrier would provide services for that phone number (call waiting, *67, *69). You would chose their physical phone for its looks and possibly its answering machine capabilities–nothing more. Your carrier took care of all the technical features of your telephone line and thus, your phone number.
How a phone number works today
There are two kinds of phone numbers: virtual numbers and carrier-connected phone numbers.
Carrier-connected phone numbers are found on a SIM card. That SIM card identifies the user of the phone number to their carrier. All calls and SMS move through cell towers so that the carrier can tally and charge the user accordingly.
The process of receiving a call to a carrier-connected number from a carrier-connected phone number looks like this:
Virtual phone numbers, like Listen and Google Voice, don’t use cell towers and aren’t contained on a SIM card. They take the concept of a phone line and turn it into software. The phone number can be accessible via smartphone or web app and the user’s identity is only known to the extent that user has decided to share to that service. Since virtual phone numbers are, well, virtual, they are able to have more flexibility for the user when it comes to features and behavior.
The process of receiving a call to a virtual phone number from a carrier-connected phone number looks like this:
Carrier-connected phone numbers connectivity to cell towers is why those numbers are able to dial 911. Virtual phone numbers typically cannot dial 911 because emergency services won’t know the caller’s location and there are specific fees and infrastructure in place to ‘allow’ a number access to 911.
Apple’s iMessages only allows a user’s carrier-connected phone number to be used. Some reasons I think this is so:
- Security–a carrier-connected number is fairly steady identification for a user
- Virtual phone numbers haven’t yet reached the point where there’s a enough demand for one’s virtual numbers to be used as a primary number
Since carrier-connected phone numbers can rely on a user’s smartphone OS to handle voice and SMS–carriers have only sought to compete with other services in the market on price. This has led phone numbers as a product to be barely touched feature-wise in the last decade, though they remain a daily part of American life.
How a phone number will work in the future
We believe that they won’t exist in the future–and if they do, they will behave much closer to what Listen is building now than the current relationship between carriers and OS. Many countries are already experiencing this: In China, it’d be no surprise if you could only call your doctor via WeChat.
Why is North America so slow on adapting to a world beyond numbers? Much of it has to do with culture and sociological reasons that I don’t have enough space to get into at this moment, but some brief speculations:
- Disjointed adaptation of technology in our society among different age groups and regions
- Lack of need for people to make international calls compared to other countries (a key component in growth of WhatsApp etc)
- Market’s lack of familiarity with and innovation for ‘feature phones’ compared to Asian countries
A service like Listen can win in the US by turning the phone number into a username. This gives our users all the features of a phone service with much, much more control than currently provided by carrier-connected phone numbers. Plus, we can innovate on Listen-to-Listen interactions so that users can have both a meaningful messenger app AND a phone service in one inbox.
