Through the years, new technologies and capabilities have been so popular they put a strain on numbering resources. Cell phones and faxes were blamed for many area code exhausts in the ‘80s and ‘90s. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996, when competition for local telephone service was introduced, we witnessed the greatest threat to area codes. At that time every one of the 4,000 or so newly certified telephone companies could request a block of 10,000 telephone numbers in over 20,000 rate centers across the country. I’m sure you can all remember how many new area codes were introduced during those years.
Machine to machine communications (M2M) poses the biggest current threat to area codes. “M2M” describes a broad array of services wherein the communication is not between two people, but between an application or device and another application or device. The earliest version of M2M is power meter reading over cellular networks. The meter integrates a device like a cell phone and an application would dial them up and collect the readings. In the future there will be many services like this only more personal; applications that will manage our houses, electronics, environmental, cars, etc. There will also be many military and commercial M2M applications. Not all of these will use telephone numbers, but many of them will. More importantly, just about all of them do today.
Most of today’s M2M applications are mobile in nature; communications traverse the mobile networks. People will tell you that there are medical applications and sensors that don’t use the mobile network. But these are dwarfed by the number of eBooks, tablets, alarms, meter readers that do use the mobile network. The networks and protocols used are heavily reliant on telephone numbers for both network and administrative functions. Your eBook and tablets have a telephone number even though you don’t know it, and no one ever uses it to talk to you or text you.
In the U.S. these devices typically use telephone numbers classified as Personal Communications Service, or 500 numbers. The first successful use of 500 numbers was for OnStar. The service needed a mobile connection to interact with the devices, but they didn’t need to be called from regular phones so there was no need to use geographic telephone numbers. The 500 area code lasted for 15 years until 2009. In 2009 area code 533 was introduced. A year later area code 544 was introduced. And in another couple of months, about a year after 544, 566 will be rolled out. Eight million numbers in 15 years and then eight million numbers a year for three years in a row.
Wow! One area code lasted 15 years, but since 2009 there has been a new area code each year. What happened? Do you think OnStar just became wildly popular?
I’ll give you a hint – No.
It’s eBooks and tablets. Do you think the numbers of these will decrease over the next couple of years?
I’ll give you another hint – Not very likely.
Juniper Research via eMarketer issued a report that says there will be 253M new tablets in 2016. That’s over 31 area codes for new tablets. And that’s just tablets. What other M2M applications could use numbers in 2016? There are only three more area codes reserved for PCS service. Obviously this can’t continue.
Don’t get me wrong, this has been the best solution for the industry so far. Really good innovation outpaces the ability to efficiently serve it. That’s what’s happened with M2M. The service providers have been extremely responsible by using the 500 numbers. This voracious appetite for telephone numbers has not affected the existing geographic area codes. And I assume there is close to 100 percent utilization in these codes, so they’ve been very efficient.
But telephone numbers are for people not machines. People need short memorable strings that they can input into devices and give to other people they want to contact them. Machines can use very complex addresses and processes to discover other machines. M2M addressing needs to transition to Internet naming and addressing. There is virtually a limitless supply of these resources. The short memorable strings need to be reserved for use by people.
The industry needs to expedite its efforts to create a new naming and addressing scheme for M2M. There is not enough work going on, nor enough urgency to solve this problem.
Quite simply we need to preserve our scarce telephone numbering resources for people.
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