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Once again, it's time for the FNGT!

If you don't know how this works, . That link will take you to another site to give you some additional information and tell you about some of our off-site features. That's also the site where we will host the weekly guitar threads, should Poal go down.

NOTE: That site is by invitation only. If you want an invite, and you're a regular participant, then just ask theBuddha, or myself.

If you do know what's going on, you probably don't need to click that link - but you may want to, to make sure you know of the other features, such as the archive or a separate forum that's invite only.

Remember, we are guests here on Poal. Let's act like it. If you're interested in supporting Poal, then .

**Once again, it's time for the FNGT!** If you don't know how this works, [click this link](https://fngt.gq/index.php?page=intro). That link will take you to another site to give you some additional information and tell you about some of our off-site features. That's also the site where we will host the weekly guitar threads, should Poal go down. **NOTE:** That site is by invitation only. If you want an invite, and you're a regular participant, then just ask theBuddha, or myself. If you do know what's going on, you probably don't need to click that link - but you may want to, to make sure you know of the other features, such as the archive or a separate forum that's invite only. Remember, we are guests here on Poal. Let's act like it. If you're interested in supporting Poal, then [you can donate](https://poal.co/donate).

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[–] • 0 pt

Someday they may need those numbers

[–] • 0 pt

I doubt it. They just add new area codes. Lemme do some math...

Every 3 digit area code can have ~8 million numbers. There are 999 combinations - minus some reserved numbers like the 555 numbers and the 800 numbers. (Those will be trivial in the results.)

There are just a touch less than 8 billion possible numbers.

That's BILLION. That's a bit less than the total global population. If they need to, they'd either increase the area code's number of digits or add another digit somewhere. But, it's gonna be a long, long time before they need 8 billion numbers in the US - and Canada. (Canada shares the system with us, which is why you can call Canada for free, often times, and why you don't need to dial a country-code when calling Canada, unlike when you call every other country. We have no such agreements with anyone else, just Canada.)

So, we're gonna be fine for a long, long time.

Eventually, we may not even use real numbers to connect to others. So, there's also that aspect.

[–] • 0 pt

Yeah I suppose, they do keep adding area codes. I've got two numbers myself. Businesses have lots of numbers. But 8 billion is a whole lot

[–] • 0 pt

I did some looking and it looks like the plan would be that they'd add a zero in the area code. It'd have to go at the end, as 0 is a reserved number and no phone numbers can begin with 0. So, my area code (Maine only has one, and is a long way from needing more) is 207 and as they start to run low on numbers they'll just change my existing area code to 2070.

At least that's what some quick skimming tells me. I am not actually an expert on the subject - but I did set up a phone exchange way back when we were too poor to afford real IT staff that had the time to attend to that stuff. For a while, IT was partially in my domain. I set up a PBX back then. We'd also convert to internal VOIP before it was fashionable. That spanned the main office and the two satellite offices. I did not set that up. We had staff by then, of course, but we actually contracted it out to the equipment provider as that was cheaper, easier, and came with support contracts.

There's a reason you get some of the jobs you get. Support contracts! They're fucking awesome, especially if you can negotiate a high availability percentage and have established penalties when the vendor fails to meet the uptime goals!

[–] • 0 pt