The 1.0 version of the telephone landlines was represented in the past by the overland telegraph wire, which was used to transmit messages in different parts of the world, using the Morse code. Nowadays, as the world has changed a lot, it’s obvious that the communication system has also changed a lot.

But first things first…

Even though the first phone was invented, as you may already be aware of, by Alexander Bell, the first landline (as I was saying, the 1.0 version or if you like, the beta version) appeared in 1876 when Tivadar Puskásm, a Hungarian scientist had invented the telephone switchboard, a device that allowed the formation of telephone exchanges, and eventually networks.

Nowadays, even though the media is almost intoxicated by the large number of mobile phones(especially smartphones) that appear almost every day, the landlines are still – but not for long time – numero uno in the communication business, especially if we compare the values of the average speaking times and how often do people use their wired phones.  If we take a look at the statistics, we can easily find that there are more than 1.263 billion main telephone lines worldwide, number that will silently decrease in the following year.

However, the top 2 countries having the most landline subscribers are China and USA with a number of 350 million subscribers in China, respectively 268 subscribers in America.

As for the cell phones, they have a history of only 39 years (the first mobile phone was released by Motorola in 1973). Still, since their release on the market, they have continuously developing, and from what we can see, the future belongs to them. Just check Gizmodo.com or Engadget.com and you will see how often are cell phones being released on the market, or at least announced on the market and you will understand.

Still, this amazing development would have never been possible without the communications companies like AT&T, Sprint (in US), Telekom, Orange and Vodafone and so on. Both of them, the landline service providers as well as the mobile communication service providers, have established a large network of numbers, network that is still working flawless.  However, even though the network and the phone number structure has suffered some modifications lately, they were meant to avoid nuisance and confusions, therefore they did not harm in any way the system.

What kind of modifications? For example, do you know the sequences from the American movies when a person dials a number starting with 555-xxx? Well, numbers like these have been erased a couple of years ago, and nowadays, whoever tries to call one of those numbers, is given an error message.

The main danger, is the way the network is structured nowadays, considering the development of the mobile industry, sooner or later, most of the companies will have to work at another algorithm of cell phone/landline numbers, as there won’t be any numbers available. For instance, in China, there are already more than 1 billion phones (mobile + wired landlines), and they are about to be the first ones to change their structure and the algorithm.