Example: Instead of “123-456-7890”
its: “JohnSmith234@Washington.DC.USA”
Because the phone system is old
It’s also backwards compatible to an extreme:
I remember in the early nineties I found in my grandmother’s antique store one of those old black candlestick phones that you would jiggle to ring the operator. It didn’t have a rotary dial.
I plugged it in and got dial tone. I jiggled the hook and an operator answered the phone and asked me something. I don’t remember if I hung up or talked with them.
When mobile phones came out they improved the system significantly but it was still very much old tech.
Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.
Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.
But that’s probably not necessary. You could install something on your phone that does phone number lookup and then just dials the number as normal. The service doesn’t need to be built into the old phone networks this way.
researchers actually succeeded in creating that phone system upgrade. the resulting communication system is the internet and world wide web.
hooray! you got what you wished for!
Phone numbers are a “legacy system” if they were designed today they would be different.
Because when the telephone system first was developed, all you had were dial phones, which could only send numbers 1 through 0 (10). So every call needed to be addressible using only numbers.
AT&T came up with the numbering system in the 40s…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan
In short because numbers take less space. In long It would require changes in IMSI. It’s probably possible with esim, possibly you could add euicc eid application as JohnSmith234@your.operator.email inside your esim profile but not sure if it would voilate some headers lenghts numbers so it won’t work everywhere except one operator and it’s relays.
“Because it would require changes” doesn’t answer OPs question. They want to know why wasn’t it done like this in the first place, and why aren’t we making the changes to make it happen now. Of course changing things would require changes.
It’s like answering a “why are stop lights red?” question with “It wouldn’t work because stop lights factories uses red bulbs and laws require them to be red”.
In the first place? We kinda did to begin with, you would phone the operator and say the name of who you wanted to phone.
Introducing phone numbers simplified this, given the operator would have to know or lookup their name, and allowed for the future introduction of automated systems. Such systems were analogue and DNS was far more advanced than them. I guess the telephone becomes so widely used and integrated under that system that it still uses a similar interface today, albeit with a cluster of different modernised interconnected backends
And that’s a much better answer!
VoIP systems are getting us closer to your example. Properly provisioned VoIP (on-prem or cloud) can take a SIP user which looks exactly like an email address and direct digital calls to a physical phone. These days it’s likely going to be sent to an office desk phone or a Teams user, but many years from now it will likely be more common to dial out like that from/to any phone device.
I think your example is a bit more nuanced in that there’s some sort of regional database that I suppose one could register for when they change their address. But I don’t think we’re moving in that direction. Things are moving in a decentralized manner and folks hold onto their digital identities, regardless of their geographical location. So like others comments have said, the phone book system is not evolving any further, because modern communication systems are already the evolved version.
