Following up to Jeff's digression:
> The whole mess is not unlike IP addressing, which is also overloaded.
> And to follow-up on a previous posting about assigning numbers to an
> individual, that would be a horrendous nightmare above and beyond that
> of the current IP management scheme.

But a personal phone number would probably be analogous to a domain name,
which could be mapped to a "physical" phone number at connection time.

One possible future would have a "logical" personal phone number assigned,
along with "physical" phone numbers for your home line, cell phone, and
pagers, with a personal phone to physical phone mapping being done through
something like the DNS at connect time.  The "logical" phone numbers might
be allocated out of dedicated area codes or exchange numbers.  In many
cases you might not even know the "physical" number assigned to some of
your devices.

Eventually all physical phone numbers might be replaced with something
like IPV6 addresses, especially as voice and data traffic move closer
together.  Telephone numbers might then literally be DNS entries of
the form 2330.252.408.1.TEL or something similar.

G.