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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 ca
by mathgorges 4y ago
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.
- Magicstatic 4y agoThis 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
- hgsgm 4y agoso, cheaper than a premium domain name.
- rippercushions 4y agoWell, 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.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoBut there is nothing different about 555 numbers than any other, and Verizon certainly doesn’t charge $2500 for a normal number.
- FPGAhacker 4y agoThe 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.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoPaying X per area code is justified, nobody is arguing against that. Paying $2500 per area code is unreasonable, as, like I said, there is nothing inherently special about 206-555-1234 vs 206-689-5312.
- misnome 4y agoAnd as the other poster said, there is. Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?
- denlekke 4y agoI found the article light on details about what exactly needs to happen and why Verizon charges the fee. Would Verizon charge 2,500$ 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 …
- mynameisvlad 4y agoWhat, 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.
- mathgorges 4y agoIirc 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 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 4y ago
- nly 4y agoSounds cheap to me to be honest.
- tadfisher 4y agoJoke's on them, I registered for Klondike-5.
- samstave 4y agoLikely because large movies were already willing to pay for such... I've never tried to call a 555 num from a movie because it was "common knowledge" that they were fake... I had NO idea that you could actually call one....
- sverhagen 4y agoWell, could you, or were they just reserved? That's still not clear to me. I guess I'll find out, next time I need to bust some ghosts.
- smabie 4y agoThe movies never paid Verizon for that. They're just numbers that don't go anywhere
- function_seven 4y agoAs far as I know the only fake range these days is 555-0000 thru 555-0199. Everything else is assignable.
- pests 4y ago555-1212 is free directory assistance, for example.
- samstave 4y ago411. I wonder if POPCORN for time still works... (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.