vane@lemmy.world 5 days ago
In short because numbers take less space. In long It would require changes in IMSI. It’s probably possible with esim, possibly you could add euicc eid application as JohnSmith234@your.operator.email inside your esim profile but not sure if it would voilate some headers lenghts numbers so it won’t work everywhere except one operator and it’s relays.
dev_null@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
“Because it would require changes” doesn’t answer OPs question. They want to know why wasn’t it done like this in the first place, and why aren’t we making the changes to make it happen now. Of course changing things would require changes.
guy@lemmy.world 5 days ago
In the first place? We kinda did to begin with, you would phone the operator and say the name of who you wanted to phone.
Introducing phone numbers simplified this, given the operator would have to know or lookup their name, and allowed for the future introduction of automated systems. Such systems were analogue and DNS was far more advanced than them. I guess the telephone becomes so widely used and integrated under that system that it still uses a similar interface today, albeit with a cluster of different modernised interconnected backends
dev_null@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
And that’s a much better answer!