A Regional Signifier 📱
Why regulatory rules, intended to boost telecom competition, made it possible to carry your past with you, in phone number form.
Welcome back to Lesser Tedium, the grocery store sample of regular Tedium. Think this is interesting? Buy a bottle of the full thing, which you can do over this way.
It’s often common to use the area code tied to your cell phone number as a quiet way of showing off your roots.
After all, if you can carry your area code with you, people know where you came from. Except when they can’t. When I first moved to my first smartphone around 2009 or so, AT&T wouldn’t let me carry my phone number with me, so as a result, I ended up going with something more local. No matter, it was a better area code anyway.
Of course, given all the annoyances that come with changing a phone number, it was very much possible that phone numbers would become a dangerous form of vendor lock-in during the smartphone age, which is why the Federal Communications Commission allowed for “number portability” after a 1996 regulatory decision—a move that was finally implemented for wireless devices in the 100 largest metro markets around 2003.
This was a complicated process, and one that took a few years to implement, as it required significant upgrades on the part of the phone industry. But it was one that there was a clear need for, even at the landline level. A Gallup survey, reported by Network World, found that 90 percent of businesses would not change their phone service if it required them to change their numbers, which meant that the FCC, in a competition-allowing mood, wasn’t going to be able to ignore this if it wanted to encourage a competitive space.
The decision to allow this was purely regulatory, but it created a fresh cultural opportunity for people who moved long distances in service of a career, as The Atlantic’s Megan Garber noted in 2014.
The rise of monthly cell service, with its flattening of the national phone grid, transformed the area code from an economic signal into a purely cultural one—and one that has the ever-more-rare virtue of connecting its owner to a physical place. You could liken an area code, now, to a sports team affiliation. Or to an alma mater. Or to an insistence that soda is properly known as “pop.”
A lot of us carry our history around with us. And some of that history comes down to the phone number people use to text us.
» Wanna learn more? Be sure to read up about the unusual logic behind area codes, a Tedium classic from 2017.