714/657 Area Codes

[Morrigoon]

Because 10 numbers is more than 8.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Morrigoon

Because 10 numbers is more than 8.

You're saying drop area codes all together and JUST use 8 numbers? That would REDUCE the number of available phone numbers. With the area codes currently in use there are ~3.5 billion available phone numbers. 8 digits would be fewer than 100 million phone numbers, not even enough for 1/3 of our population to have their own number (France has a population of only about 65 million).

ETA - oops, decimal error in my post prior to this. The 600 unused area codes is about 5 billion, not 500 million unused numbers. Even less reason to start messing with the number of digits in a phone number. You want to have a pool of available numbers that's vastly larger than what you'll actually use so that you can keep the numbers that are assigned relatively distinct from each other to avoid confusion.

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

...8 digits would be fewer than 100 million phone numbers...

A LOT fewer: eight digits would be 10 million (10,000,000). Dropping all numbers starting with "0" and "1" (you can't [under our current system] have those as the first number of a phone number) and you're down to 8 million.