Jamaica running out of phone numbers [Telecom]

Mobile number portability was not, up to a few months ago, in the immediate plans of the Office of Utilities Regulations (OUR) but is now a priority issue, as Jamaica prepares to apply to the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for a new batch of codes.

Jamaica was assigned eight million usable numbers in 1997, but is now down to one million, according to Maurice Charvis, OUR deputy director general, due largely to the growth in the mobile market.

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Reply to
John Mayson
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Jamaica has 2.7 million people, about the size of Chicago. Can they prove that the 876 allocations were done efficiently without number portability? Of course not. But then, this hasn't prevented NANPA from assigning new area codes anywhere else.

I'd like to suggest that they get assigned 872.

Reply to
Adam H. Kerman

[...]
[...] Of course, not everyone has a home phone, a mobile and an office phone (or they would have used more than 8 million numbers already) but PABX's will have a block of numbers with many spares.
Reply to
user

Canberra, in Australia, a city of around 200,000-300,000 people around 1990, had 800,000 useable 6 digit numbers, and yet they also must have been running out of numbers, for Canberra numbers were changed from (062) xx yyyy to (06) 2xx yyyy, thus providing an additional 200,000 numbers. For example, you could have (06) 20xx yyyy but not (062) 0x yyyy. So all the home phones, second home phones, business phones, faxes, DID blocks, separate voice mailbox numbers, fax numbers, etc. etc., that either were there or would appear over the next decade, would have been enough to cause them to make this move. Mobile phones had nothing to do with this as they had their own area code.

Liron

Reply to
Liron

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