We all have them. Some of us have multiple. Services have come up to consolidate them. Yet, the question remains, do we still need them?
If you look at it historically, these numbers were assigned based on locality. It was like an address, where numbers which were close in proximity would invariably link up houses which near each other as well. In fact, they originally began not as the pure numeric codes we see today, but as alpha-numeric combinations where the lead alphabets would mention the city in which the number existed. This made sense when phones were tied down to the house.
Today's world, is very different. Cell phones outnumber land lines in most countries around the world. Cell phones have no geographic distinctions. A number just has to be unique across a country, with country codes obscuring the fact for internationally unique numbers. This still leaves us with often hard to remember convoluted combinations of digits. As humans, remembering seemingly unrelated numbers in one series, can be quite a challenge. This leads us to my original question.
Some of you may argue, that there is no need to remember phone numbers anymore. Every phone has sufficient memory to store and remember all the contacts you will ever need. To me, that is solving the wrong problem. In a world where everything is now moving away from the circuit switched networks that defined the archaic telephone system, to an IP based, packet switched networks, surely we can come up with a better way of addressing the myriad of devices out there. With the arrival of LTE, every phone will always have an IP address, that will globally distinguish its peers.
IP addresses bring us back to numbers. That is a problem that has been solved, however. Something along the lines of a URL or even like our email addresses would be a good choice. This is something, that most of us are used to, and will be relatively easy to remember should we every lose our phones.
An example could be something like phone://home.zoxcleb or phone://work.zoxcleb
phone: is just the protocol identifier, like FTP or HTTP. If you have multiple people at one house, you could update it to phone://personA.home.zoxcleb where zoxcleb is basically like the family domain for all phones. What do you do if you move out, and need your own "domain"? Obtain one and then update the address to forward your requests out for some time until you can update all your contacts. The address will also be service provider independent, just like today's websites are agnostic of the hosting service. This makes address portability a breeze.
Todays phone numbers may just be the status quo, but as the number of devices go up, we will eventually reach the threshold that 10 digits can support. Before we do, and have to add yet another digit, it might be worthwhile considering a change in the way we do things.
9 comments:
The way I understand it, the introduction of "user-friendly" names for phone numbers is not going to eliminate the need for having numeric identifiers for the phone. When sending voice packets, we cant expect to put a alphabetic name in the header of each packet we send across the network. The header size will increase too much. What you're suggesting here is essentially applying DNS to phone numbers, which is a great idea. Google Voice tries to do much the same thing right?. By providing one number (which in theory can serve as a placeholder for a more user-friendly identifier), the user can configure which phone (the numeric ID) it should be forwarded to. A simple extension to Google Voice requires appending a "h", "w" etc to the end of the Google Voice number. With this, we can essentially identify the home phone, work phone etc for that person. So
phone://zoxcleb corresponds to (GoogleVoiceNumber)
phone://zoxcleb/home corresponds to (GoogleVoiceNumber)h
and so on.
In fact, the back-end for toll-free services like 1800-AAA-AAAA is essentially a DNS-like service
I'm not saying get rid of the numbers, I'm saying mask them. IP Addresses are masked by domain names, I just feel we should consider the same thing.
Your suggestion, the extension, would also work, but you still keep the slightly harder to remember numbers. Its much easier to remember calling you as phone://bhave rather 412 etc.
The toll free services that you talk about, just convert the numbers into something human readable. In effect, all you are doing is dialing 1800-222-2222, but you remember it as 1800 AAA AAAA. You do, limit the options available, for eg, what will the person at company BBB BBBB do? He cant use the same number, whereas using the full keyboard, we don't end up with such discrepancies.
Right, my point is that the infrastructure for doing DNS for phones has always been there (toll-free services) or the new google voice. Instead of using only digits as identifiers, they just need to allow alphabets and dots or slashes in their identifiers (like domain names) and allow more flexible mapping (not doing simple alphabet substitution into digits)
And name clashes are always going to be there regardless of what scheme you use.
Toll free services is not DNS. Its just a convenient mnemonic for u to remember the number. When you dial, its like any other call you make.
Google voice is not DNS either. Its just a mapping of time of day with incoming number and some rules that you set. Accordingly google just reroutes the call. Its more of a router than anything else.
I agree, name clashes would also exist in the new scheme, but mathematically you would have a lot more combinations possible before a name clash occurs.
So u suggest using a central DNS instead of the current distributed DNS (current scheme is a distributed DNS in the sense that every phone has a address book and you rely on it for the name -> phone mapping).
And I see there are real strong reasons for not making it centralised. The sensitivity of the information and the nature of use (phone numbers are not as public as ip addresses) would go against it.
And coming to think of it, there are more and more disadvantages of using a public scheme (Say, how easy/difficult is it to mask/block ur phone number from the reach of a selected few)
Hi,
I am not very sure if the cell numbers today are randomly assigned. Though a cell number is a set of non sequential numbers, it is a combination of certain codes like the say, HLR(home location register) code of the cell. However problem of 'difficult to remember numbers' remains.
The mask you specified here can be the email id or the owner name etc. This can be mapped to a combination of say a cell number + unique sim card number or something like that. This will make the cell numbers reusable. However the problem here is that it will be easier for pranksters to detect a person as the mask would be a easier option to remember.
Im not sure that toll-free services are just mnemonics and that you are simply dialing a regular number. Most of them make use of the SS7 protocol
http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/ss7/topic08.asp
SS7 queries a database to decide how to handle a 800 call. So in theory if the protocol can be extended to allow letters, dots and slashes in the number (as opposed to just digits), we have DNS-like functionality.
@Aditya
Thanks for pointing that out. Was not aware of it. So the system does exist in some sense, which is interesting to note. The extensions would be an interesting idea.
@Ram
Your distributed DNS comes into play only once you have the number. Otherwise, you end up spending time trying to get access to the number. This can be a problem when it comes to getting in touch with companies, and other such places.
Today we have so much important stuff in our email, and there is no way of "blocking" our email from being spammed. This is the same problem that you talk about with the phone protocol. Unless you know the exact handle of the person online, you cant really email/call them. The problem that needs to be solved there is to prevent the spammy attacks. You could also have rules in place, such as, if the call comes from a number listed in our address book, let it thru, otherwise send it to voicemail.
Your last point makes no sense whatsoever. In todays scheme how easy/difficult is it to mask/block your phone number? That part stays the same. If someone can troll the phone combinations to get at you, they can troll thru the alpha-numeric combinations to get at you anyway.
@Shilpa
You bring up the same point as Ram. If a prankster wanted to play a prank on you, he'd rememeber your number anyway. This makes it easier for your friends/acquaintances to get in touch with you.
Here's my OCD based problem, I have this real need to be able to categories phone numbers into areas because of the neatness thingie -- and it's SO HARD if not completely impossible to do that anymore. Very annoying. Though I'm not sure it's reason to start hating the world.
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