The first week after 855 rationing was lifted 89,149 numbers were activated, which is about twice the typical weekly volume. There are 10,469,573 spare or available toll free numbers in the national database which the SMS estimates will last just five years.

2 comments

We monitor the 800 supply very closely and have tried to explain the shortage of toll free numbers in words, but I think this graph shows it much mroe clearly than any words could. This graph is based on the numbers below and you’ll notice that there’s literally ZERO 800 numbers and very few 866 numbers. That’s just because there haven’t been any ’800′ numbers in the spare or Available pool for a couple years.

I’m not sure why there are so few 866 numbers, except that it may be because the SMS database gives out 866 numbers first when someone doesn’t specify the area code. But whatever the reason, there haven’t been many 866 numbers available for a while now either. It’ll be interesting to see how 855 numbers are received and how quickly some of them get taken. Next I’m going to graph the toll free numbers active with a couple companies too which should be very interesting!

Today is the 43rd birthday of toll free numbers, which were first introduced by AT&T on May 2nd 1967. Few marketing tactics from the 60s have survived and flourished and been so widely used and accepted. Today toll free numbers are one of the most proven marketing tactics of all times. That’s because everyone likes free and advertisers love, the increased response rates, national image, credibility, control and memorability.

In fact, toll free numbers are more popular today than ever, to the point that we’re literally running out of them. There haven’t been any ‘800’ numbers left in the spare pool for years, thanks to the high capacity request process developed mostly by companies that make money from wrong numbers. By next summer we’ll be totally out of toll free numbers and they’re already making plans for 855 numbers which will probably be released between 6 and 12 months from now. The details are still being worked out but we will keep you posted.

There’s no confusion about who owns a domain name, so why is there so much confusion about ownership of toll free numbers? Here are the 5 main reasons I could come up with.

1. All phone companies want to keep you using their service as long as possible. Even if they aren’t withholding your ability to transfer the number they still don’t want you to transfer it anywhere else. So it’s really not in their best interest to make it clear that you can transfer it away if you want to.




2. Companies that claim ownership and withhold your right to transfer a number obviously don’t want anyone to realize that they’re holding customers hostage. So they definitely try to hide that and use misleading or even conflicting language to confuse new customers.




3. There is no Whois database that you can look up to see the official owner of a toll free number the way you can for a domain name.




4. Similar to the point about no whois database, companies are required to protect their customer information. The customers name and address, is also a large part of the security and verification process for transferring numbers.




5. Some FCC & Big Phone Company lawyers claim there’s technically no “ownership� of toll free numbers or phone numbers in general. This technicality has more to do with protecting the phone companies when they screw something up, than it does with the reality of toll free numbers.

Unfortunately the bottom line is that you can’t rely on someone who has an incentive to keep you there (and paying them), for your ability to leave them.

That’s a hard question to answer, about a database of millions of toll free numbers available. If there was a simple answer to it the floods of people in your industries would have already taken them. Fortunately it’s really more of a database than just a simple list. So you have to make specific queries into it, and the answer depends on how creative you are with your searches.

If you only try the obvious terms that everyone else would have been searching continuously in a popular industry, the answer it probably not a lot. But if you’re creative you’ll probably not only find things, but they’ll be more unique and memorable and stand out more than generic terms that everyone uses would. So think outside of the box for best results!

There were 47,630 numbers activated last week (below the 90,000+ average) leaving 4,187,484 toll free numbers in the available pool. At this rate the SMS predicts there may be as little as 46 weeks of numbers left.

There were 100,520 numbers activated this past week bringing the number of available numbers left in the national SMS800 database to 4,438,791. A forecast performed in February 2010 indicates the current pool of toll-free numbers will exhaust in second quarter 2014. The forecast also indicates that the 90% threshold of the current pool, or 28,629,000 toll-free numbers in use, will be reached in the fourth quarter 2011.

The quantity of 800#s in use increased by 33,849 this week to 25,993,113, leaving 5,816,887 #s available as of 8/31

With only 5,973,411 toll free numbers left we’ll probably run out of toll free numbers about the same time Nokia announces their new 10G cell phones which become the newest craze in the year 2030. See the Nokia concept phones pictured to the right.

The supply decreased by 24,327 numbers last week which means there is about a 20.5 year supply left at that rate. And I figure we’ll probably have 7 more generations of cell phones in the next 20 years. They may get tired of numbering them and might switch to names instead. Hopefully they won’t name any of them Vista!

The point is that there’s a lot of numbers left. The trick is just finding you the best ones that relate to your business. And that’s where we excel and want to get you the best possible number for your business.

There are 34,778 more numbers in use this week than the work before which means at that rate we would have a 14 year supply of toll free numbers left. So why are some people (like the FAKE SMS) trying so hard to create fear that we’re running out of numbers? I think they’re trying to create fear that they won’t be able to get a toll free number if they don’t act now, because the Fake SMSgov site is actually run by someone selling toll free service.

They are also trying to make a case for releasing 855 numbers despite having typically a 15 to 20 year supply of toll free numbers. When you think about it though, the people who want 855 numbers don’t want them because they can’t get a toll free number or even an ‘800’ number. They want them because they can’t find any good numbers any more. The solution isn’t more numbers, it’s a better search technology and more creativity. The day after they introduce 855 numbers the Mass Misdial Marketers and Shared Use companies will have all of the good numbers anyway. The consumer won’t really benefit unless they change the rules.

The solution to any so called 800 number shortage is a better search process to check and find more relevant numbers that are available, and that’s what we do. We’re the solution to any shortage of good numbers much more in the long run than releasing another batch of numbers is.

We finally broke the 6 million available number mark. As of July 4th, there are exactly 5,983,862 numbers in the spare pool, which is exactly 24,218 fewer numbers available than last week. At that pace, we will run completely out of toll free numbers in 2030. I searched on Google to find out what else will happen in the year 2030 and found the following things I thought were interesting:

1. World population will reach 8.3 Billion
2. China will be the largest economy in the world followed by India.
3. The European Space Agency hopes to land humans on Mars between 2030 and 2035.
4. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will construct a manned lunar base.
5. The 2030 Unmanned Transport Vehicle (UTV) pictured above will travel over smart highways getting 50 miles per gallon of water.
    

There was a lot more but honestly any predictions for over 20 years in the future are mostly just educated guesses because that’s to far into the future to predict or worry about. We’re going to run out of everything and will reinvent everything in the next 20 years. So we have enough toll free numbers for the foreseeable future despite the constant cries of the Fake SMS and their factless and nameless posts.

The hard part is just finding some that are good and helpful for your business which is where we come in at TollFreeNumbers.com

According to the SMS there are 6,008,080 available toll free numbers left as of June 27th. I threw in “Experts Agree” just to poke fun at the Fake SMS that keeps claiming experts agree that there is a toll free shortage or some kind of toll free emergency, and that rationing is on it’s way. Smsgov.com always uses the phrase Experts Agree without ever including any facts or details whatsoever. They hate it when I quote the actual 800 number facts that show there’s a 15 to 30 year supply depending on the week because they have no facts, just hype.

If the fake SMS says “Experts Agree” without citing any names, that means they’re lying and made up the rest of the story. They never name any experts just like they never mention who belongs to their fake organization the Toll free Advisory Committee, that doesn’t exist. In fact they never even say who’s writing any of their articles. Their website is set up to hide the identity of whoever is posting their sky is falling posts so that they can make things up and say absolutely anything without any facts and get away with it.

2 comments

As of June 20th, 2009, there are 6,045,772 toll free numbers in the spare or available pool. That’s down by 17,482 numbers in the past week. At that rate there would only be enough toll free numbers left to last for 29 years or until the year 2038.

I don’t know about you but I’ve got enough things to worry about for the year 2038 already. That’s when another form of the Y2K bug for Unix will hit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem It’s just as silly to worry about the year 2038 bug today as it is to worry that we’re running out of toll free numbers in 29 years.

Toll Free Fact: The top four companies in terms of 800 numbers, have just under 70% of the almost 8 million, “800″ numbers. The interesting part is that consumers have never even heard of two of the four company names.

Last week there were 6,084,315 toll free numbers available and this week there are 6,063,254 toll free numbers available. That means 21,061 more numbers are in use this week than last week. That means we would run out of numbers in just over 24 years or the year 2033, at this pace. So despite the fake SMS’s constant posts about a shortage and rationing, that’s as honest as their fake organization is.

Looking deeper into the numbers though I did noticed an interesting statistic. There are basically twice as many 888 numbers in disconnect at the moment as any other area code. I think that’s a factor of some house cleaning by larger phone companies. These are the actual SMS 800 statistics not an unknown organization pretending to be relevant by claiming the sky is falling.

As of Saturday, June 6, 2009 there are again 6,084,315 numbers in the national database. There are 63,693 more numbers in use this week than the week before. So this was a bigger week than usual. There are also more numbers coming out of disconnect this month are also most others. We’ve had more backorders this month than we’ve had in any other month in a long time. So there are also a lot of numbers being returned to the pool as well.

2 comments

According to the SMS as of May 30th 2009, there was exactly 6,148,008 toll free numbers in the available or spare pool. To put it into a little better perspective that’s about the population of the state of Indiana, or the city of Rio de Janeiro.

There were 40,830 more toll free numbers active this week than last week. That means we have only a 12.5 year supply of toll free numbers left so at that rate we would run out of toll free numbers in 2022. If you want to see how many numbers there are left for yourself just look through the ALL.TollFreeNumbers.com directory in the 877 area code.

The Real SMS statistics this week showed that as of May 23rd, 2009 at 11:59pm there were exactly 6,188,838 spare or available toll free numbers. That number is down from the week before by 16,751. At that rate, we only have a 30.7 year supply left. That means at we would run out of toll free numbers sometime in March 2040.

Just to put this into perspective I decided to Google “only a 30 year supply” to see what other things we have only have a thirty year supply of. I found several reports that say we have only a 30 year supply of oil, there’s only a 30 supply of uranium and a video of Al Gore saying we’ll all be dead in 10 years!

So as much as it could be said to be in my best interest to make people want to get their number faster by trying to make people believe we’ve already run out, I believe the facts are more important than trying to hype something for my own personal benefit the way the Fake SMS is doing. I’d love for them to come out with 855 numbers sometime soon, because that would be a great boon for my business. But with a 25 to 30 year supply that’s really not going to happen any time soon.

Don’t believe the Fake SMS reports about the sky falling and we’ve already run out. You’ll have your mortgage paid off and we’ll all be talking to cell phones pinned to our shirts like they did in star trek before we actually run out of toll free numbers.

The Real SMS says that as of Saturday May 16th, 2009 there are 6,205,589 numbers remaining in the spare or available pool. That means that there are 20,283 fewer numbers this week than the week before. At that rate we will run out in only about 25 years. That’s not quite the imminent disaster that the FAKE SMS keeps writing about!

1 comment

Contrary to what the Fake SMS is posting, the real SMS reports that as of Saturday, May 09, 2009, there is a total of 6,185,306 toll free numbers remaining in the spare or available pool.

The real SMS’s most recent forecast performed in November 2008 indicates the current pool of toll-free numbers will exhaust in about 8 years, in July 2017. The fake SMS is running story after story to make everyone think we’ve already run out. Sorry fake sms, the sky isn’t falling.

At 11:59pm on Saturday, May 2, 2009 (my birthday), there was a total of exactly 6,336,855 toll free numbers remaining in the spare pool. That’s a decrease of 36,739, from the week before, which means we’ll run out of toll free numbers in just 14.4 years or October of 2023. It just so happens that I started TollFreeNumbers.com 14 and a half years ago so I think I can probably last that long. But we’re certainly not exactly running out of toll free number. We’re just running out of really good numbers.

If you’d like to see how many toll free numbers are available, look through a few pages in our new directory, like http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/877/906_5xxx.html. You can play around and click to thousands of other pages each with a thousand numbers.

1 comment

As of Saturday, April 25, 2009, there are exactly 6,300,116 toll free numbers remaining in the spare pool. This represents an increase in the amount of active toll free numbers of 21,507 active numbers. At this rate the current supply of toll free numbers would only last another 24 years. There may be a shortage of really good toll free numbers, but there’s certainly no shortage of toll free numbers in general. I wonder why smsgov.com doesn’t have these statistics put out by the real SMS?

2 comments

With 6.32 million toll free numbers available as of 11:59pm on 4/18/09, there are 37,372 fewer toll free numbers available this week than there were last week. At this rate we will run out of toll free numbers in just over 14 years or sometime in the year 2023. So if you read about toll free shortages, realize that’s just hype and the sky really isn’t falling, at least not this year.

“The Number Administration Summary Report for the week ending Saturday, April 11, 2009, shows a total of 6,358,995 numbers remaining in the spare pool. The quantity of numbers in use decreased by 36,815. A forecast performed in November 2008 indicates the current pool of toll-free numbers will exhaust in July 2017.”

This is from the SMS/800 weekly report. I’m going to start posting this each week. Logan Marshall has has been trying to create a panic for a long time with lots of phony stories on his fake smsgov.com site and on tollfreenumber.org too. So I figure the best answer is to his sky is falling attitude is just to post the actual statistics.

We ARE running out of toll free numbers. There is only an 8 year supply left. So the sky is falling, it’s just not falling any time soon.