• guy_threepwood@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    If you still have a land line you can dial locally without even an area code. This worked in most countries. Some mobile phone networks kept this tradition although in a weirder way: you could dial locally when physically located in those areas, and your phone would display the area code you were in on the its standby screen. Which worked as long as you weren’t on a border between cells and it picked the wrong one.

    Over time this went away.

    I don’t think this is what you have experienced, but it was a nice thing that blurred the lines between land line and mobile phones for a little while, and I think it’s interesting.

      • argh_another_username@lemmy.ca
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        9 hours ago

        Brazil has a stupid numbering system for phones, now. Instead of having three digits area codes and several area codes for highly populated areas, they have two digits area codes and nine digits phone numbers. (But it’s not the case here, here is a scam caller)

        • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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          6 hours ago

          But, why?

          Seriously, if you understand how this came to be, I’m curious. I’d think they implemented land lines using extant hardware systems of the era, and the number structure surely was well established by that point?

          Now I’m off to go down a rabbit hole of telecom implementations worldwide.

          • argh_another_username@lemmy.ca
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            6 hours ago

            I don’t know exactly why. A quick search told me that “because the people wanted that way”. In Brazil, we don’t use the area code for local calls, so, if they created a new area code for the same city (like we have in Montreal, the 514 and the 438), it would cause confusion.