This is more a shower thought that has started to eat at me. Even with the addition of area codes and country codes, with all the businesses and people with multiple phone lines, how are we not out of available phone numbers? Is this something to even be concerned about or is there a process to retire and recycle unused numbers?
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They keep adding new digits.
My UK mobile phone number is 11 digits; UK mobile phone numbers always start with 07, so even within that 07 prefix that’s 9 digits… which is a *lot of numbers -* a billion! Enough for everyone in the UK to have 14 mobile phone numbers each. If they started to run out they’d do what they’ve done before and add another digit to the start – it wouldn’t be super-painful now either because so few people need to remember the actual full numbers!
And yes they do recycle the numbers.
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