[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?

[denlekke]

I found the article light on details about what exactly needs to happen and why Verizon charges the fee. Would Verizon charge 2,500$ for me to get a 1 area code 555 number for my cell phone for instance? For multiple area codes, why is it difficult to route more than one number to a secondary number ? Is it passing along the origin area code data that requires different hardware or software than normal numbers ? Etc …

[mynameisvlad]

What, exactly, is difficult and expensive to maintain about a 555 number compared to any other?

Let's be real, we're all tech engineers here. Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. There's nothing at all special about maintaining one mapping vs another.

[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.