[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.

[mathgorges]

Iirc the article mentioned that 555 numbers used to be reserved for internal use, so my hypothesis is that implementing external 555 numbers likely required some sort of retrofit.

But I don’t have any domain knowledge here, so this is really just a guess

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[iudqnolq]

> Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop.

All I know about telecoms comes from Wikipedia, but that makes no sense. Why would the technology that determines where to route your call be related to the protocol used to transfer data long distances?

(Also the Verizon quote is from 2003.)

[mynameisvlad]

Telephony backbones are, for the most part, just SIP. When I say they’re IP based I mean they’re not old school POTS loops anymore.

It might have cost 2500 per area code when that was a requirement and you had to set these up loops up manually across longer distances, but nowadays it literally is just going to be a mapping in a computer, like any other.