Local Phone Numbers

For many people the concept of a ‘local phone number’ has sort of gone away. I mean, most people with mobile phones are used to long distance being the same as a local call, in terms of price anyway, and heck, I’m never sure if I need to dial the area code or not, so now I always do to avoid getting a message saying that I didn’t… Even many years back I had a home number, mobile number, work number, and fax number that all had different area codes. (And I had to give up my 414 number, argh!)

I’ve been told that at the local school, where they appear to be running a VoIP system (by Cisco I think?) that from the classrooms they can only call locally, where locally mean the phone number starts with a ‘5’ as in 555-5555. (Is their VoIP system somehow internal only, with an outside bridge to local numbers? I don’t know enough about this to do any more than guess…) I’m assuming this is to prevent the classrooms from making long distance calls. The problem here is that if a parent doesn’t have a traditional landline/local phone number, they can’t be reached without someone going to the school office to place a call.

I mean, if I’m using VoIP at 2 cents per minute from my home anywhere in the US, what’s up with the school? The funny thing is that last year when I saw the phones in the school I thought they were ahead of the times, and now I think they are behind.

I guess the moral of the story is to keep moving forward… Or maybe there is no moral, maybe it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened. (Hmmm…)