How many phone numbers are there in the world?

“How many phone numbers are there in the world? This is a question that isn’t easy to answer,” said a person I know, whose name I won’t mention. “There is no number of people who have a mobile phone in their pocket right now.” He was probably right, but what he said wasn’t completely true. I do have a mobile phone in my pocket right now. The question was: How many phone numbers are there? Not people with phones, but just the phone numbers themselves.

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This brings up another question: What is a number? Is it something that starts with one and then ends at nine and has six numbers in between 1234567? Or does a number just have three numbers: 123? And if one of those numbers is 011, then what about that example is different from this one: 0310123456789?

Assuming that all over the world each person has a single phone number that would bring the totals to 7.9 Billion numbers. But this is not always the case, there are some people with more than three mobile numbers. In the Netherlands, for example, a person has to have a number for work and another one for private calls. So our friend from before would probably say that the world population is much higher than 7.9 billion, but how many exactly?

In 2021 there were about 7.9 Billion people in the world. This means there are about 7.9 billion numbers in 2021. But in America, for example, there are more numbers than people. This means that the answer is less than 7.9 billion. So the answer must be between 7.9 billion and 7.9 million? But who cares about America? We are interested in the whole world! Let’s say that each number is used only by one person, and this is definitely wrong, but we want an easy formula. It might be above 10 Billion phone numbers around the world.

The good thing is that most carriers have started to restrict the number of SIM Cards that an individual can have at a time. Safaricom for example has limited the number to three cards.

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