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Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

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Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#31

Post by s1mon »

s1mon wrote: post #26

I love how it isn’t until the third paragraph that the post mentions what country 555-XXXX numbers are relevant to. This is the World Wide Web folks, not the USA web. The whole blog and offering seems US centric, to the point where I’m assuming it might not work very well at all for people outside of the North American Numbering plan area. We wouldn’t know because they seem to assume that the only people who are goin…

Ok, a couple of down votes on this. I’m curious why. I was born and have lived almost all of my life in the US. I get tired of provincial web sites assuming that any random person who stumbles upon it will only be from the US, or even more insane, just from the local area. ( e.g. a restaurant site which just has a street address, or a newspaper site which assumes I know which Springfield it’s about)

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#33

Post by GauntletWizard »

Only vaguely related, here's the Peanuts comic strip that did not use a 555 number, resulting in people calling it looking for Snoopy: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1965/08/15

The number in question belonged to Peanuts TV Special producer Lee Mendelson, though of course the area code was omitted and so many other random families received calls.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#34

Post by WalterBright »

Every time I see a 555 number in a movie, I'm reminded that it's a movie and am dropped out of immersion.

So what if the movies use a real number? They could just sign up for a number, use it, and no harm done.

Or just use 867-5309. Wherever that number goes, the person there is expecting it.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#35

Post by boomboomsubban »

linsomniac wrote: post #29

I peeked through the historically reserved numbers list, and there was a surprising number of what looked like individuals listed in there. Of the 10,000 numbers available in 555 prefix, most of them seemed to be individuals. I wonder what the story was there... Were people just doing it because they could contact the NANPA and ask for one?

I assumed individual professionals, things like an agent or a lawyer. Particularly as I saw an example where several different names redirected to the same number.

Any idea what the second column is? It's labeled "CL" with the possible responses of L, N, R, or D. R seems to be reserved, D in dispute but L and N I can't place.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#37

Post by rippercushions »

Magicstatic wrote: post #5
mathgorges wrote: post #3

Very fun article, thanks for sharing :) 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.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#39

Post by im3w1l »

boilerupnc wrote: post #36

Related: Here’s a number many wish they didn’t have. 867-5309 [0] [0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/867-5309-jenny/

What does it mean that many wish they didn't have it? How do multiple have the same number?

Edit: And in case you thought I misinterpreted him the article says "The biggest complaints about the new phone exchange come from Nina Clemente '03 and Jahanaz Mirza '03, the two students with the telephone number 867-5309."

Anyway if I had that number I would try to sell it to only fans or something like that lmao.

Re: Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number

#40

Post by renewiltord »

WalterBright wrote: post #34

Every time I see a 555 number in a movie, I'm reminded that it's a movie and am dropped out of immersion. So what if the movies use a real number? They could just sign up for a number, use it, and no harm done. Or just use 867-5309. Wherever that number goes, the person there is expecting it.

You know what would be cool? If a movie bought a zero day and put it in. Haha! It would be neat if the exploit stayed undiscovered till release.
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