[mathgorges]

Very fun article, thanks for sharing :)

I think the current title ‘You could own a 555-XXXX phone number but Verizon’s charged you $2,500 to use it’ doesn’t capture how bad the deal was —- here’s the relevant quote from the article

> Verizon was notorious for charging high fees to establish service to 555 numbers, charging $2,500 for each area code that you wanted your 555 number to be routed in.

[Magicstatic]

This is the craziest part of the whole article - imagine you wanted to own something like "555-FOOD" - to have this vanity number work in every area code, you'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars (annually?) if you used Verizon to route the calls

[rippercushions]

Well, yes? At the end of the day that requires Verizon to provision that number in every single area code, which historically are all separate little domains.

It's kind of like complaining that if you want to have foobar.tld for every top-level domain, you have to fork out money to every TLD registrar to make it possible.

[mynameisvlad]

But there is nothing different about 555 numbers than any other, and Verizon certainly doesn’t charge $2500 for a normal number.

[FPGAhacker]

The point is you don’t have to dial an area code with the 555.

555-abcd, sans area code, would just work and route to you no matter where (in the USA) a caller was calling from.

Therefore it is equivalent to having that number in every area code.

Now there is a good chance you aren’t old enough to know/remember this, but people in the US didn’t have to dial an area code (and occasionally nearby area codes) when calling people in their own area code. In the era of land lines this was the norm.

You paid a lot of money per minute to call people “long distance” in other area codes.

Now it’s absolutely normal and routine to dial with an area code, in large part because people’s numbers follow them around and there is no reason to think someone geographically near you is in the same area code.

[mynameisvlad]

Paying X per area code is justified, nobody is arguing against that.

Paying $2500 per area code is unreasonable, as, like I said, there is nothing inherently special about 206-555-1234 vs 206-689-5312.

[misnome]

And as the other poster said, there is.

Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?

[FPGAhacker]

As I said, you paid per minute long distance charges to call another area code. A 555 number would not be long distance. Therefore they charged up front.

[flatline]

I have lived and worked in places where you only have to dial 4 numbers because there is only one exchange! Or five numbers when there are two.

[rippercushions]

Thanks for filling in the gaps in my explanation. Sigh, I feel old...

[nly]

Sounds cheap to me to be honest.

[hgsgm]

so, cheaper than a premium domain name.

[tadfisher]

Joke's on them, I registered for Klondike-5.

[samstave]

Likely because large movies were already willing to pay for such...

I've never tried to call a 555 num from a movie because it was "common knowledge" that they were fake...

I had NO idea that you could actually call one....

[smabie]

The movies never paid Verizon for that. They're just numbers that don't go anywhere

[function_seven]

As far as I know the only fake range these days is 555-0000 thru 555-0199. Everything else is assignable.

[sverhagen]

Well, could you, or were they just reserved? That's still not clear to me. I guess I'll find out, next time I need to bust some ghosts.

[pests]

555-1212 is free directory assistance, for example.

[samstave]

411.

I wonder if POPCORN for time still works...

(back in the day you could walk up to any payphone and dial POPCORN and it would give you the current time)

in the 80s while were were BBS-ing, we used to have a challenge of calling 411 (information) and the challenge was social engineering how long you could keep the OP on the phone and how much info you could get out of them, like where is your call center, tell me about it, tell me about you... blah blah...

2600 type stuff... we were 13 years old. Captain crunch is my hero.