Hong Kong mobile numbers may have to start with 'unlucky' 4 and 7 as vacant numbers get used up

Inauspicious digits could be pressed into service as city's dwindling supply of numbers is used up

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Most Hong Kong mobile numbers start with 9, though numbers starting with 5 and 6 were added in 2000. Photo: May Tse

Published: 2:15am, 24 Aug 2015Updated: 6:25pm, 24 Aug 2015

Hongkongers could soon have to accept mobile phone numbers starting with the inauspicious digits 4 and 7, as the city's insatiable appetite for smartphones threatens to see all vacant numbers used up within 21/2 years.

The Office of the Communications Authority is set to launch a public consultation on the matter towards the end of the year. The watchdog said there were 5.14 million numbers available for mobiles as of March, but they would be gone by February 2018 if Hongkongers continued to register new mobiles at a rate of 145,000 a month, as they had for the past three years.

The idea is likely to prove highly controversial. The number 4 in Cantonese sounds similar to the word for death. So seriously is the tradition taken that some developers exclude floors with the number 4 from buildings. Meanwhile 7, lucky to some in the West, is frowned upon as it is pronounced like a Cantonese swear word in some contexts

The idea of using mobile numbers starting in 4 and 7 originated in a paper tabled to the office's Telecommunications Regulatory Affairs Advisory Committee as an alternative to using numbers with more than the traditional eight digits. Using longer numbers would "incur significant social and economic costs to the community", the paper said.

Hongkongers gave the idea a mixed reaction yesterday.

"People nowadays are no longer that superstitious, at least that's what I think," said Alice Chan, who is in her 40s.