It seems that 11-digit phone numbers are not enough in Japan.
Japan plans to issue 14-digit numbers by 2021, responding to reports that the country may run out of 11-digit phone numbers by 2022.
The rapid adoption of IoT devices (which require their own telephone number in Japan) has almost exhausted the offer of 11-digit telephone numbers according with the Japan Times. The use of 5G in Japan from 2020 is expected to completely terminate the existing telephone numbers.
The proposal of the Ministry of Communication of Japan for the provision of 14-digit numbers was accepted by the three major mobile operators in the country: NTT Docomo Inc., KDDI Corp. and SoftBank Corp.
Currently, there are 11-digit numbers starting with "090", "080" and "070" and used in mobile phones in Japan. In 2017, 80 million 11-digit numbers from "020" were made available for IoT devices, of which almost half have been used up.
Japan probably will not be the only country facing the problem of needing more phone numbers to service more devices.
Last year, the number of IoT devices in the world exceeded the number of mobile phones. As of 2008, there are more connected devices on the planet than the population, and by 2020 it is projected that there will be 50 billion connected devices worldwide.
____________________
- Lenovo foldable PC: Presentation of the first foldable
- Zuckerberg: splitting Facebook will not help
- The difference between "feature updates" and "quality updates" in Windows 10
