Once upon a time the directory enquiries service was a national treasure, it was the ultimate source of information! This was back in the days when, although the UK had just as many telcos as it does now, there was one that dominated massively: BT. The main reason it was so popular was to do with BT's dominance - every BT number was registered and accessible via directory enquiries which meant pretty much every single number in the country.
Nowadays since the directory services market has been privatised, the reliability of any/all of them has dwindled vastly. Largely i think (though I am, completely admittedly, an untrained outsider) it's because BT have their own privatised service, and thus are unlikely to share their database with anyone unless they get paid a lot of money to do so! This, combined with their expense has seen huge decline in directory services, to the point where I'm really not sure that we need them anymore.
You see, technology has moved past them now that we have the Internet. For example, I am typing this post on my phone via an email that will be delivered to blogger via my home wifi. Should my home wifi fail as it has had a habit of doing recently, then it will happily fall back to my 3g connection (either way it will be automagically imported to facebook). It's been quite a few years now since Internet capable phones were produced, but there's a key difference now - the new ones are actually GOOD at going online, in a way that is worth using, much more so than their predecessors.
Combine this with the advent of Web 2.0 which, is basically a complicated way of saying "give the users what they want" and we have mobile-accessible versions of FREE websites that can do the same job as 118118, and depending on how good your phone and your 3g reception is this can be almost as fast as calling a phone number, or sometimes even faster. And let's point out again that this is FREE!
I think it's a shame really, because I think that looking in the phone book or ringing the operator for a phone number is something that I regard as being quintessentially English. But the world must move forward and just as landlines were probably once regarded as new, and people probably said it was a shame we didnt send old-fashioned letters anymore, so the world continues to move forward and now their is a new old, and an even newer new.
This post consists of my uninteresting musings, and was brought to you by the letters G, E, E and K, and the number 1337.
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