I'm about to move next week and I was on the telephone for about 2 hours today and achieved nothing like the answer I was looking to get.
Upshot is, I was wanting to know, when I move, can I take my current phone number with me to the new place?.
All I was told was unless it was a new connection, I would have to have a new number.
This peeves me somewhat, because everyone I know knows my number.
What is the case in other parts of the world?.

This us usually dependent upon the new location's proximity to the serving central office. Each office serves all addresses within a specific geographical area. Once you cross out of this boundary, you are within the service area of another central office. Let's say you had a "448" number at the old location. The new area is served by the "653" exchange. You would need to be assigned a 653 number at the new address. There are ways around this, for example you can pay an extra monthly fee for mileage charges between the central offices. This would pay for a circuit between them to transport your old number to the new one. This is known as "foreign exchange" service and is very expensive. A less expensie route would be to get a new 653 number and forward your old one to it. They can perform this within the central office so that your old number doesn't really appear anywhere.

Oh, and yes, these boundaries can actually create ares where opposite sides of a street are served by two different central offices. That happens quite frequently in the town where I live in the US.

At one time, the prefix ( the first part of the number) was tied to a specific geographical area. That is, you could say that number 123-XXXX was located on the west side of town, between Main St. and Easy St. That is no longer the case.

With mechanical switching replaced by electronics, that number can be located almost anywhere the phone company goes.

Don't expect the folks at customer service to admit this, though. I finally got a decent answer after talking to the repair folks.

It probably depends on what telco you have and how advanced their switching system is.

I am with MTS/Allstream in Winnipeg Canada and there is no problem moving telephone numbers between the 60 or so different exchanges in the 14 central offices if I move. And I think that is has been like this for the last 5 years if not longer.

In fact MTS will ask if you want to keep your existing number when you call in to change your address.

As well I could also move a single line telephone number to / from Shaw Cable telephone service in Winnipeg to MTS if I want to change providers.

And in March of this year the CRTC (Canadian version of FCC) is allowing single line numbers to be ported to and from all communication vendors (cell phone, telephone co's, and cable co's)in the local serving area.

This number portability as stated in the post above will now make it harder to know what part of they city you are calling.

True, LNP (local number portability) is very much in effect here, but there are still rate centers to associate numbers to specific geographical areas for billing purposes. For example, my office is served by a central office that normally hands out 703-550- or 703-541- numbers that permit calling to a much larger area than the other 703-339- numbers offer. I can pay extra to be in the 703-550- rate center through higher monthly fees for the line or just get a basic 703-339- number that has a much more limited calling area. It is regulated by each state's public utilities commission as to where numbers in a certain rate center can be.

For those of you who have posted, it's true that numbers (as in the prefixes for them) have a certain level of portability, but the local calling areas are still tied to the home exchange where they reside. Yes, I can get a VOIP service provider to allow me to keep my 703-339 number and take it to Chicago, but the billing rate for people to call me is still based upon the physical location where 703-339 is assigned in Virginia. My neighbor in Chicago will have to dial (and pay for) a long distance call to Virginia to reach me by my having kept my original number.

I guess what I am saying is that "numbers" are no longer physically tied to a local telco switch, but the rate charged to call them can't be changed. I was attempting to simplify my original answer to the original poster's question since I think that was more in-line with what he's being told by the telco. Not every city, state or country has LNP yet since it's a work in progress. My wife still has to dial a long distance call to reach my cell phone from home since my number was requested to be associated with a Washington, DC rate center since that's where most of my cell calls go. Is that clear as mud?

May no longer be the case, but some phone companies tie the prefixes to certain towns. I used to live in Morrisville, where '-295-' and '-736- are mostly used. In Levittown, '269-,' '-849-' and a few others are used.

So while it may be possible, phone companies just won't give you a number outside of your "Zone."

Ian A.

You may have to set up your existing number as a Remote Call Forwarding number, around here that costs about $20 a month....

The other portability issue we have here is where a company other than BT is providing the local loop, e.g. cable service in the larger towns. When this was starting out, changing to cable service meant getting a new number even if you were in the same house, because the prefix was used to route the call. With number portability, that's no longer the case. While it might be true that if you order a regular BT landline you'll get, say, a 40 prefix and if you order cable service you'll get something different, you can now port that existing 40 BT number over to cable, or vice versa.



The prefixes were tied to the central office, and many small towns had just the one exchange.

Go back 50+ years and many small towns in America had only 4-digit local numbers, and even then only a few of the thousands ranges might have been in use (e.g. 2xxx thru 6xxx).

When local numbers were made up to 7 digits for DDD, the office in that town just got the one prefix, and that's all it needed until such time (if any) as it outgrew the allocation. In fact in SxS offices in some places you could still make local calls within town by dialing just the last 4 or 5 digits (due to digit absorption in the selectors).

The same sort of thing happened within specific districts of larger cities. To take one example from over here, the Muswell Hill/East Finchley area of north London was served by the TUDor (883) prefix. When numbers started to run short in the 1950s the GPO allocated a second prefix HIGhgate Wood (444) which was located within the same central office building.

So somebody ordering new service in a particular house might have been given a HIGhgate Wood number, but somebody moving into that house from anywhere else within that same area could most likely keep his existing TUDor number if he wished.

By the way, for anyone interested in this sort of history I have a full list (PDF) of the old London director codes up until to the change to All-Figure Numbering in the 1960s. Just PM me for a copy.

or..if you have it available over there...port your number to a VOIP service. Then you can go anywhere you want and your number will follow along. Plus, long distance is cheap.

but not sure if you have VOIP over there yet

In Ireland in the past each switch had an assigned range of numbers and it was possible to identify exactly which switch each number belonged to and it was impossible to port the number to another switch without all sorts of problems i.e. you'd have to take a number on the exchange you were moving to and have your calls forwarded from the old number but, pay line rental for both lines!

The situation now is we have MNAs (Minimum Numbering Areas) which consist of groups of exchanges within a specific area code. It's usually no problem to move your number within the same MNA, but it can be problematic if you want to take it outside that area.

E.g. Dublin's (01) area code, has 3 MNAs.

If you change to another provider who actually move you over to their equipment e.g. a cable phone, VoIP or some of the LLU (local loop unbundling) providers you're assigned a new number on their range within your MNA, then within a few days your existing number is ported over and "mapped onto it"

They're in the process of radionalising our numbering plan in Ireland at the moment. This involves merging the existing 63 area codes and creating larger region codes with 7-digit local numbering.

The current system simply has too many sub divisions and makes porting numbers rather messy.

You have:
01 - Greater Dublin Area
02 - Cork City and County.
04 - East
05 - Midlands and Southeast
06 - Southwest/Midwest
07 - Northwest
08 - Mobile Services (there are now more numbers assigned in this prefix than in all of the other area codes combined!!)
09 - West

The problem is that each of those regions subdivides into up to 19 area codes!

E.g. 02 splits into (021), (022), (023) right through to (029)
09 splits into (091)... through to (0909) !!

They're basically moving to a system where we'll just have the regional codes without the lower level sub-divided areas.

The mobile 08 code is split into :
083 - XXX XXXX (3 Ireland)
085 - XXX XXXX (Meteor)
086 - XXX XXXX (O2 Ireland)
087 - XXX XXXX (Vodafone)
088 - XXX XXXX (Digiweb 4G)
089 - XXX XXXX (Tesco Mobile)

Originally, they had to change the prefix on your mobile number if you changed operator, now there's full portability so you keep the prefix. There are actually very few numbers issued on the newer networks prefixes as most people ported to them rather than having a new number assigned. The vast majority of numbers being 087 and 086.

Don't know what the situation is like in N.Z., but it's been available in Britain for a few years now.



Wow!

4.7 million mobile phones in use in Q4 2006 (that number has increased)
Total official population = 4.2 million.. some of the number would be new arrivals, people who don't appear on census, people with more than one mobile etc etc.

There's only about 2.5 million local loop lines on the PSTN! + a few hundred thousand ISDN lines and then talking small numbers of VoIP and Cable phone users at present (thousands not tens of thos)

Mobile voice mins used in 2005 Q3: 1,449,462,000
SMS Q3: 1,048,112,000

The actual phone number itself, was a mere formality in hind-sight.
Moved in here and the telephone hadn't been used in 5-6 years and was still the old 3-wire system.
But the real problem was that any call I made, the person on the other end couldn't hear me properly and the audio level at my end was shocking.
Got the local Telecom contractor in to look at it and he said that it must be my phone that's faulty.
I disagreed and said that he never even bothered to test the line at all.
3 days later and still the problem wasn't fixed so I rang a mate of mine who used to work for Telecom as a faults/exchange tech on the phone to let him know what the line quality was like.
During our call there was a disconnection tone in the background, and my mate reckoned that there was a crossed line with someone down the road.
Got the contractor back and sure enough that fixed it, meanwhile in the hiatus without having a working phone line, I ripped out all the 3-wire sockets and wiring and replaced it all with new stuff using a 2-wire system.
Phone works well but the broadband connection is a bit dodgy, with regular line drops (usually when I'm typing an important e-mail or uploading some files to the work computer).
I can live with it though, I think.

Trumpy,

I wouldn't take that from your telephone company. If there's an on going problem with the line, see if they can swap you a different path back to the exchange. It's often possible that they might have quite a few spare pairs on the local wiring system.

Sounds like there's some seriously faulty cable on the route back to the exchange.

If your DSL is intermittantly dropping out, it's possibly a bad junction / damaged cable / damaged insulation.

Don't mention the DSL, just tell them you keep getting intermittant crackles and you want the line fixed.