Post by danny bursteinPost by seekerI know someone who has maintained contact with me i suspect to keep
track of me. He has had the exact same phone number for years and
claims no cellphone number. He has moved perhaps a dozen times in the
past 10 years yet his phone number is exactly the same. I have heard
of 500 or 700 numbers which were said to be portable permannent
numbers a person could buy. Does anyone know if they still exist or
if
there is a modern day equivalent?
The "700" (and later "500") numbers were not directly hooked
up to a specific landline, but instead (and I'm simplifying
a bit here) routed by the "owner" to whatever final destination
phone that was in place. This could be done once at the
beginning of summer - when you moved to your country home,
and then again in the fall.
Or it could be changed each evening. Or every five years
when you moved.
But it still required there be a "real" phone in the
mix, or rather, at the end. Note that the owner never
had to give out that number... Although clling out from
there would have provided the CNID of it.
For someone to have kept the same landline phone number
through a dozen years would have been possible via a
a: if all the moves were within the same "phone area",
the telco could have swapped the wires - physically way
back, via computer command now. Back in the Bad Old Days
this would have been only doable in the area covered
by that central office - which could have been anything
from just a few miles to tens or more in rural areas.
Nowadays the telcos have expanded that region, so, for
example, you can move anywhere in Manhattan (a borough
of NYC) and keep your number.
b: if moving out of that zone the owner could have paid
for either a "foreign exchange line" or for "remote call
forwarding". Depdning on where and when and the telco,
this could have ranged from modest sums to a huge expense.
c: did/do calls to him actually get answered by a person?
If it's always an answering machine, then it could be that
the calls simply end up on a bit of tape, or nowadays
a magnetic disk, somewhere or another and that's been
the case for these years...
Anyway, if you want a "permanent" number, there are plenty
of choices nowadys. The simplest is, of course, a cell phone,
but you can also get any of the various flavors of "Voice over IP".
The way these work is you've got an adapter in which you
plug one end into a computer circuit (DSL/cable), and the
other side of hte box has a phone jack. Simply hook it
up anywhere you've got internet access, and your phone
line (and number) is right there.
If you don't have internet access where you're staying,
just about all these services include a voice-mail option,
and many of them will let you pull up those messages
via e-mail or web page.
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