What time is your area code?

My girlfriend complained about New Yorkers (which she loves doing since she grew up there) in an email this morning: "Some things never change, New Yorkers don't consider area codes to relate to time zones." My first thought was that New Yorkers might be ahead of the rest of us, a role Californians usually play.

My only phone number now is my cell phone. But I acquired that number when I was living in the 650 area code. I've since moved into the 415 area code. That's only a difference of 30 miles or so. I know other people with the 917 area code, a NY code, who have moved across the country or to other parts of the world. (I think Manhattan residents started getting cell phones with non-212 area codes before anyone else, because they had run out of 212 exchanges with wired phones.)

Two things have happened to virtualize phone numbers to such a degree that you will no longer be able to rely on knowing where someone is by looking at their phone number: 1) Local number portability. 2) Voice over IP. In the first instance, the rules changed to force operators to allow customers to keep their phone number regardless of where they get their service. This change was to allow for greater competition, since operators used to think THEY owned your phone number. In the second instance, the idea that phone calls travel over the internet means that location no longer matters. In fact, it is much more significant than that because it means the whole reason for having different phone numbers doesn't matter anymore. We used to have a phone number for work, a phone number for home, a phone number for our hotel, a phone number for our portable phone -- in other words, a phone number was a way to call a device, not a person.

Going forward, the technology and the social custom is going to shift so that a phone number is a way to reach a person. It's not far enough along yet that I'm willing to publish my phone number in this blog. But eventually I will, because the technology of the phones, the software in them and the software in the system will allow me to manage how I want to use that phone, including whether I want to answer it or have a call routed somewhere else, without having to be a programmer.

But that will be a few years off yet. And then my girlfriend will have to find another way to complain about New Yorkers.

Comments

[Jim Dempsey]

I finally went the voice over IP route. For just $2.99 a month I instantly upgraded from 408 area code to 415!

I had tried Skype and found the voice quality poor and lost connections when simply downloading email. However, the Yahoo Voice I have now seems to be rock solid. They claim better voice quality than landlines, which seems to be the case--landlines have a limited frequency response.

The one gotcha so far is that I cannot customize the voicemail greeting.