goudreau@dg-rtp.dg.com (Bob Goudreau) (02/21/90)
I'm curious about the telephonic dimension of the impending reunification of Germany. I've read that the Deutsche Bundepost (the West German PTT) has started planning ways to bring the East German telephone system into the late twentieth century. Does this mean that the East German system (country code +37) will simply be modernized, or are we in fact going to see the absorption of East Germany into the existing West German system (country code +49)? If not, we'll be confronted with the (as far as I know) unprecedented situation of one country being split among multiple country codes! Conceivably, this might also be an issue someday for other divided countries such as the Yemens, the Koreas, or China/Hong Kong/Taiwan. There are some new candidates for the opposite condition too (multiple countries sharing the *same* country code). Currently, this only applies to +1 (US, Canada, parts of Caribbean), +21 (several North African countries), and a few of the "microstates" which are for all intents & purposes part of the country whose code they use (Vatican City, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Monaco). But in the next few years both Yugoslavia (+38) and the Soviet Union (+7) might break up (or at least spin off some independent countries). Would such new countries as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia want to remain in an "integrated numbering plan area +7" with the Soviet Union? Or would they prefer to be assigned their own codes? Finally, consider the interesting case of the Moldavian SSR, which was sliced off from Romania (+40) and forcibly annexed into the Soviet Union by the same Nazi-Soviet pact that consigned the Baltic states to their fate. If Moldavia is rejoined to Romania with its present numbering system intact, it will fall into yet a third category: *parts* of countries that use *parts* of other countries' number spaces. Bob Goudreau +1 919 248 6231 Data General Corporation ...!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!goudreau 62 Alexander Drive goudreau@dg-rtp.dg.com Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA