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Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 day agoBut, why?
Seriously, if you understand how this came to be, I’m curious. I’d think they implemented land lines using extant hardware systems of the era, and the number structure surely was well established by that point?
Now I’m off to go down a rabbit hole of telecom implementations worldwide.
argh_another_username@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I don’t know exactly why. A quick search told me that “because the people wanted that way”. In Brazil, we don’t use the area code for local calls, so, if they created a new area code for the same city (like we have in Montreal, the 514 and the 438), it would cause confusion.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 22 hours ago
Haha, love when people decide to just cowboy shit up their way. I’m sure they had reasons, but that’s still just awesome.
The US didn’t (still doesn’t) use area codes for local calls on/to landlines (by definition, calls in the same area code are considered local). The reason the area code is important in places like Montreal (large cities) is the number of subscribers. Seven digits gets you 1 less than 10 million numbers.
Though I suspect the original reason was performance on old mechanical switches (which were still in use into the 2000’s in some US cities). I’ve been in them and those switches are nuts, and crazy loud. If you can route calls to a new switch just using the area code, you don’t have to wait for 6 digits - just start routing after 3, and the new switches will handle the rest. Sort of a load balancing for switching, and would make calls faster - you could bounce the call out of the switching center sooner, especially in areas before tone dialing was a thing (again, mechanical switching was tied to “dialing”, tone became a thing with electronic/digital switches.
I don’t know this is what they did, I’m just guessing.