Little-known? This has been going on since long before I was born. When I was a kid, one of the neighbors got a number that had previously belonged to a defunct pizza parlor.
I believe that it used to be standard practice for the telco to age out a number for about six months after disconnecting it, before assigning it to a new customer.
So I have no idea why the author of the article thinks that things should be any different for cellphones than they have always been for landline phones. It's not as if there is an infinite supply of new phone numbers.
--scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."