Hypothetically speaking, if someone is living in New York and they call 911, how does the call not go through a hospital in Los Angeles or other city from another state? How does the call automatically transfer to a local hospital in the area one lives in?
In: Technology
When you dial numbers on a phone, there’s a gizmo on the other end of the wire that decides “where” to send it. The gizmo is local to you so it knows when it gets 9 followed by 1 then 1 to send the call to the local 9-1-1 dispatch.
If you had started dialing 720 or 303 and you were in Denver, the gizmo would know it was about to route to somewhere else in the Denver metro area. The next numbers help figure out exactly where. If you dialed 719 instead the gizmo would recognize this as everywhere else in CO and the rest of the numbers would determine where.
Or if you dialed 712 the gizmo would know to route to a part of Iowa.
Different numbers for country codes and so on.
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