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Basically, it hasn’t happened because there’s a lot of possible numbers but it can happen eventually. Tricks like recycling numbers that aren’t in use anymore can help keep the system going but here in NZ we did come close to running out of numbers or at least changed the system to prevent it
Our system has 02x ### #### for cell numbers with the x being a number that used to indicate which phone company you were with. It’s not quite that simple now with people able to take numbers with them when they switch.The 7 # gives us 10 million possible numbers for a population of about 5 million and we can go as high as 100 million once you count the 3rd digit (x).
We used to only have 6 numbers after the prefix (e.g. 025 (for Telecom) 123 456 or 021 (vodaphone) 123 456) so about 2 million options for a population of about 3 million at the time (2 networks with 10^6 options each) so when they got close to running out, they just added another digit which immediately gave us 10x as many options.
I believe this happened in 2007 at the same time as the mobile number portability system was implemented
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