Telephone number selection

1. A communications system comprising:

a mobile network to provide communications for a plurality of mobile communications devices over a wide-area IP network, wherein each of the plurality of mobile communications devices is associated with a respective mobile directory numbers are associated with the plurality of mobile communications devices;

a wireless local-area network (WLAN) to provide communications for a plurality of communications devices over the wide-area IP network;

a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) service coupled to the mobile network and the WLAN via the wide-area IP network, wherein the plurality of communications devices are associated with VoIP telephone numbers;

a public switched telephone network (PSTN) coupled to the VoIP service; and

a communications routing system coupled to the plurality of communications devices and coupled to the VoIP service; and

wherein at least one VoIP telephone number for a user account is selected from a subset of telephone numbers, wherein each alphanumeric representation of respective telephone numbers in the subset is within a threshold Hamming distance of a seed obtained from a user account variable.

2. The system of claim 1 , wherein the subset is filtered from a global telephone number pool based on the seed.

3. The system of claim 1 , wherein the subset comprises a set of telephone numbers with the smallest Hamming distance from the seed.

4. The system of claim 1 , wherein the seed comprises a mnemonic seed.

5. The system of claim 4 , wherein the mnemonic seed comprises one of: (i) a functional mnemonic phrase; (ii) a selection of characters from a functional mnemonic phrase; and (iii) a homophonic combination of a functional mnemonic phrase.

6. The system of claim 1 , wherein the seed comprises one or more of: a user's first name, a user's last name, a user's account username, a user's date of birth, a user's ZIP code, and a user's latitude and longitude pair.

7. The system of claim 1 , wherein the subset is further filtered based on location information for a mobile communications device associated with a user, wherein the telephone numbers have an area code for a geographic region determined based on the location information.

8. The system of claim 1 , wherein the seed associated with a telephone number is displayed with the telephone number for selection by a user.

9. A method of assigning a telephone number to a user account in a communications system, the method comprising:

obtaining a seed from a user account variable;

obtaining a subset of telephone numbers, wherein each alphanumeric representation of respective telephone numbers in the subset is within a threshold Hamming distance of the seed;

receiving an indication of a selected telephone number from the subset; and

assigning the selected telephone number to the user account.

10. The method of claim 9 , wherein the subset is filtered from a global telephone number pool based on the seed.

11. The method of claim 9 , wherein the subset comprises a set of telephone numbers with the smallest Hamming distance from the seed.

12. The method of claim 9 , wherein the seed comprises a mnemonic seed comprising one or more of: a functional mnemonic phrase; a selection of characters from a functional mnemonic phrase; and a homophonic combination of a functional mnemonic phrase.

13. The method of claim 9 , wherein the seed comprises one or more of: a user's first name, a user's last name, a user's account name, a user's date of birth, a user's ZIP code, and a user's latitude and longitude pair.

14. The method of claim 9 , further comprising obtaining an area code, and wherein the subset is further filtered based on the area code.

15. The method of claim 14 , wherein obtaining the area code comprises

obtaining location information for a communications device associated with the user account; and

determining the area code for a geographic region associated with the location information.

16. The method of claim 10 , further comprising reserving, in the global telephone number pool, the telephone numbers in the subset.

17. The method of claim 16 , further comprising responsive to reserving the telephone numbers in the subset, tracking a predetermined period of time.

18. The method of claim 17 , further comprising:

if the indication of the selected telephone number is prior to the predetermined period of time elapsing:

assigning the selected telephone number to the user account; and

releasing other telephone numbers in the subset back to the global telephone number pool; and

if the selected telephone number is not received prior to the predetermined period of time elapsing:

expiring the predetermined period of time; and

releasing all the telephone numbers in the subset back to the global telephone number pool.

19. The method of claim 9 , further comprising displaying the subset of telephone numbers at a communications device with the respective seed used to generate the telephone numbers.

20. A server for assigning a telephone number to a user account in a communications system, the server comprising:

a memory;

a communications interface;

a processor interconnected with the memory and the communications interface, the processor configured to:

obtain a subset of telephone numbers, wherein each alphanumeric representation of respective telephone numbers in the subset is within a threshold Hamming distance of a seed obtained from a user account variable;

receive an indication of a selected telephone number from the subset; and

assign the selected telephone number to the user account.