Why haven’t we run out of cellphone numbers?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Phone numbers have 10 digits, so there are 10,000,000,000 possible combinations of phone numbers from 000-000-0000 to 999-999-9999. Some of those can’t actually be phone numbers (for example, 911 can’t be an area code, neither can 411, etc.) and area codes can’t start with a 0 or a 1. All in all, there are about 2,030,000,000 unusable numbers, leaving us with 7,970,000,000 usable numbers, which is still a bit more than the world population. Since people can have multiple numbers, we may hit a point where we have to add a digit to expand the available numbers, we’re just not there yet.

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