The principles of permutation and combinations are about arranging a group of numbers or objects. In permutations, the order of arrangement matters while in combination the order does not matter (Sobecki, 2019). These two principles have a wide range of application in real life. This paper will delve at illustrating how the principles of permutation and combination are used in the telecommunication industry. More specifically, it will illustrate how telecommunications allocate telephone number to subscribers around the world or across a nation.
The Telephone Numbering System
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the body that is responsible for the allocation of telephone numbers. This body determines and assigns country codes to all nations across the globe. Usually, the country codes range from 1 to 3 digits, and these codes are followed by city codes, which also range from 1 to 3 digits. Next in the series of number is telephone numbers themselves and these numbers usually go up to 7 digits.
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The ITU regulates and controls the allocation of these numbers, and thus these numbers have to be in a specific order. For this reason, this implies the principle of permutation in mathematics. In order to efficiently allocate country codes to all country, one needs to determine the number of ways 3 digits can be arranged from a group of 10. i.e.
Since there are 273 countries in the world today, this means that all the countries could easily be assigned telephone codes. Since the city codes are also 3, there are 720 ways to arrange 3 digits from a group of 10. This means that the principle would allow up to 720 combinations for area codes. However, when allocating phone number, the principle becomes technically different. Phone number usually constitutes of 7 digits, which are typically broken into 2 segments of 3 and 4 digits. The principle of combination is used in the allocation of phone numbers since the arrangement follows no order.
For the first segment (3 digits),
For the second segment (4 digits)
Technically, these allocations and the possible combination of numbers would give,
Since the present world population is less than the value obtained above, it means that every person on earth could be assigned telephone numbers with ease. The example above illustrates how the principles of permutation and combination are used in the telecommunication industry.
References
Sobecki, D. (2019). Math in our world (4 th ed.). Penn Plaza: New York, NY, McGraw-Hill Education.
