Isn't 8 digits closer to 100 million unique numbers than to 10?
The international standard for identifying postal items
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Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#12Does that complex algorithm for the check digit have any advantage over the much simpler algorithm used for EANs or 13-digit ISBNs?
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#13Isn't 8 digits closer to 100 million unique numbers than to 10?
It’s exactly 100 million unique numbers.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I wonder what was the constraint to not make it longer when they developed the standard. Making it a few digits more seem it wouldn't cost much.
The cost will be in updating every legacy postal system that currently has fixed column lengths/input field length limits.
Yes, now, but the person you're replying to was asking about at inception.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#15Isn't 8 digits closer to 100 million unique numbers than to 10?
Author here - yep! It is, that was a typo in the article.
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#16Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#17Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#18I’m surprised this article didn’t mention the LPC code [1]
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#19With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it. I can't come up with a decent estimate, and maybe I'm way off. But with the growth of sellers like Shein or Temu, I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped that many parcels in like a single day ? Or at least in a timeframe short enough that they would have over 10 million shipped but yet-to-be-delivered parcels, effectively running out of…
> With a limit of 10 million different serial numbers, I wonder how China does it.
The author has issued a correction, it's 100 million numbers per service indicator. But even then, it's probably not enough.
The boring answer is that your shipping options are either get untracked postal service (which the S10 standard does not apply) or use a private courier (which also does not use the S10 standard).
If you insist, you got two options for UPU-based postal tracking: normal e-commerce parcel aka H-codes, practically 2,300,000,000 trackable packages per year [1]. EMS is the other route, and there are another 2,300,000,000 trackable packages per year [2]. However, in my experience tracked postal delivery is only used in certain countries where it is more advantageous than private delivery (like until very recently in the US, for complicated reasons [3]), while other destinations has a more-than-willing private delivery partner (that is not the Big Three [4]) or even set up the delivery systems themselves.
1: 23 service indicators: HA-HW, HX-HZ are reserved for multilateral/bilateral use only
2: another 23 service indicators: EA-EW, EX-EZ are reserved for multilateral/bilateral use only
3: https://www.thewirechina.com/2020/11/22/delivering-chinas-ma...; https://www.ft.com/content/a1233f3e-d21a-11e8-a9f2-7574db66b...
4: DHL, FedEx, and UPS
Re: The international standard for identifying postal items
#20Does anyone know what's going on with the DataMatrix code next to the address on some mail, such as periodicals such as magazines, which contains the full name and address of the recipient in what looks to be a standardized format with field separators?