Maine State Grange

by John Lowry, Master/President of Porter Grange

MEGO Alert! [My Eyes Glazed Over] Our recent post regarding Maine’s 207 area code inspired John to share some additional information. Sure, there’s some technology involved–but isn’t technology involved in just about everything these days?

It seems to be a point of pride for many communities and locations.  I remember when, in Massachusetts, 617 was split to include 508, and all the businesses that objected to having a 508 number and be assumed to be “in the sticks.”

Addressing is a thorny and sometimes fun issue that exists everywhere there is modern telecommunications.  Location is sometimes assumed and often desired but is not achievable.  It used to be possible with the telephone companies and pretty much had to be in order to mechanically route between switching centers. You knew if it had a prefix of abc that it had to go down the wire toward abc or toward some device that knew where abc was.  That’s not possible today, and you might be surprised to know that number portability has made the phone system very much like the Internet. 

In general, there is a mapping function from the phone number to an IPv6 address, just as there is for a phone number and an E911 address, which is maintained by the user. You can usually find the IPv6 address in your phone if you poke around in settings.

For cell phones, once the phone is connected to a tower, its POTS number (truly called that by engineers for “Plain Old Telephone System” is recorded in a database, but the phone is assigned an IPv6 address.  So when you make a call, the system looks up the POTS number you are trying to reach and then finds the associated IPv6 address and establishes a route to the remote system.  Some of this complexity, especially with the international calling schema, is what allows scammers to appear to call from someplace or someone you know.  (BTW: the phone companies know how to fix this, but it will cost some money, so we consumers lose.   The solution is called ingress filtering.

In any event, with number portability, you can keep your 207 number no matter where in the US/Canada you move to.  And if enough people do it, then a new area code will have to be assigned for Maine just to handle all the people who move to… Florida?

In Internet terms, blocks of IPv4 addresses are assigned and even bought and sold. They have nothing to do with the location of whoever is visiting your website except statistically in the same way that 207 usually means Maine.

This is irritatingly pleasant to those of us who want to limit our information exposure and who use a VPN or … Starlink.  (VPNs do work but are expensive and require some technical know-how).  Starlink, in this part of the world, enters the big Internet in an “Internet hotel” in NYC.  (An Internet hotel is basically a large building full of routers and connections to all the other big ISPs).  So when I go shopping at a large online retailer like Lowes, Costco, etc., they always want me to choose my “home store,” which is invariably in Queens.

My 978 number is routinely used by the Mass state government and politicos who want me to know about COVID-19 vaccine availability or political candidates.

In any event, I’m guessing that you’re bored now. If not, you might look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System.

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