I think the current title ‘You could own a 555-XXXX phone number but Verizon’s charged you $2,500 to use it’ doesn’t capture how bad the deal was —- here’s the relevant quote from the article
> Verizon was notorious for charging high fees to establish service to 555 numbers, charging $2,500 for each area code that you wanted your 555 number to be routed in.
This is the craziest part of the whole article - imagine you wanted to own something like "555-FOOD" - to have this vanity number work in every area code, you'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars (annually?) if you used Verizon to route the calls
Well, yes? At the end of the day that requires Verizon to provision that number in every single area code, which historically are all separate little domains.
It's kind of like complaining that if you want to have foobar.tld for every top-level domain, you have to fork out money to every TLD registrar to make it possible.
The point is you don’t have to dial an area code with the 555.
555-abcd, sans area code, would just work and route to you no matter where (in the USA) a caller was calling from.
Therefore it is equivalent to having that number in every area code.
Now there is a good chance you aren’t old enough to know/remember this, but people in the US didn’t have to dial an area code (and occasionally nearby area codes) when calling people in their own area code. In the era of land lines this was the norm.
You paid a lot of money per minute to call people “long distance” in other area codes.
Now it’s absolutely normal and routine to dial with an area code, in large part because people’s numbers follow them around and there is no reason to think someone geographically near you is in the same area code.
Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?
I found the article light on details about what exactly needs to happen and why Verizon charges the fee. Would Verizon charge 2,500$ for me to get a 1 area code 555 number for my cell phone for instance? For multiple area codes, why is it difficult to route more than one number to a secondary number ? Is it passing along the origin area code data that requires different hardware or software than normal numbers ? Etc …
What, exactly, is difficult and expensive to maintain about a 555 number compared to any other?
Let's be real, we're all tech engineers here. Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. There's nothing at all special about maintaining one mapping vs another.
Iirc the article mentioned that 555 numbers used to be reserved for internal use, so my hypothesis is that implementing external 555 numbers likely required some sort of retrofit.
But I don’t have any domain knowledge here, so this is really just a guess
> Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop.
All I know about telecoms comes from Wikipedia, but that makes no sense. Why would the technology that determines where to route your call be related to the protocol used to transfer data long distances?
Telephony backbones are, for the most part, just SIP. When I say they’re IP based I mean they’re not old school POTS loops anymore.
It might have cost 2500 per area code when that was a requirement and you had to set these up loops up manually across longer distances, but nowadays it literally is just going to be a mapping in a computer, like any other.
As I said, you paid per minute long distance charges to call another area code. A 555 number would not be long distance. Therefore they charged up front.
(back in the day you could walk up to any payphone and dial POPCORN and it would give you the current time)
in the 80s while were were BBS-ing, we used to have a challenge of calling 411 (information) and the challenge was social engineering how long you could keep the OP on the phone and how much info you could get out of them, like where is your call center, tell me about it, tell me about you... blah blah...
2600 type stuff... we were 13 years old. Captain crunch is my hero.
I think the current title ‘You could own a 555-XXXX phone number but Verizon’s charged you $2,500 to use it’ doesn’t capture how bad the deal was —- here’s the relevant quote from the article
> Verizon was notorious for charging high fees to establish service to 555 numbers, charging $2,500 for each area code that you wanted your 555 number to be routed in.