On Jul 18, 2022, at 9:26 PM, Hunter Fuller via VoiceOps <voiceops at voiceops.org> wrote:
(Aside from "it was initially done for a reason that is no longer relevant" - that does not hold water to me because phone numbers themselves exist for the same reason. If we invented VoIP today, everyone would use SIP URIs only, so it would be the same as your email address.)
Well. Maybe. But phone numbers continue to serve a defensible purpose as a universally routable identifier. You can argue that their structure or format is obsolete, but you can?t say they don?t *do* anything. You can still send a call to a number to a PSTN switch and it will know where - anywhere in the world - to send it. Billions of people rely on this functionality daily. It does work. Dialing an ?outside line?, in contrast, serves _no_ purpose, because there literally is no ?outside line?. The only reason to continue it is to perpetuate user custom and habit. ? Alex -- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC Tel: +1-706-510-6800 / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/