Personal Postal Addresses

In the unorganized world, we change our postal addresses much more frequently than they used to in the organized world when many more people lived and worked in the same place for many years. These days, we move around as we change where we work, travel and study. 19.6% of Americans moved house in 1994 (Economist, 21/12/96). Lots of people change where they live on a regular basis and have to try and let everyone know where they are moving to in order that contact continues rather than "Not known at this address: Return to Sender". Have you ever seen the piles of unclaimed mail at student houses?

We live in a world of personal e-mail addresses and telephone numbers which provide a master contact address which can be pointed at any underlying e-mail box or telephone number. If I want all of the calls made to my personal number to arrive on my home phone rather than my office number, I can get the calls re-directed by letting my telephone network know. So what about the concept of personal postal addresses? Every individual gets an address for life and can be reached through it forever.

Currently, all that is available is the concept of Post Office Boxes which are organized on a local basis, just like Standard Telephone Dialing Codes. You can change where you live within the local area without changing your post office box address, but if you move cross-country you have to change address and box number.

So what would stop the introduction of true non-geographic postal addresses? There are several barriers to the technical realization and practical implementation of personal and portable postal addresses:

1. You could issue everyone with a unique number depicted by one of the machine-readable bar coding standards that have been adopted. These days, laser printers can routinely print barcodes. Even Optical Character Recognition of handwriting could be used when letters are scanned through posting machines.

2. The next barrier to the is the speed at which the personal postal address data can be looked up and dynamically routed to the current actual postage address. You could be clever and hold in Random Access Memory (RAM) all unchanged addresses, such that once the address has been looked up once, the database knows that it is the current address and no new look up occurs. Only when people access the Web, enter their Personal Identity Number and update their postal routing details using an electronic form, does this trigger an update to the actual address details held in memory. Relational databases running on high specification workstations or even PCs can these days handle a large number of such look ups per short unit of time.

3. However, the database look up may be fast enough, but the external communications interfaces, for example, TCP/IP or X.25 may constrain the rate at which personal postage addresses can be passed across to the database for look up. The interface between the envelope reading machine and the computer system running the PC would have to have the capacity to handle the required traffic being looked up.

4. Then of course the next stage of the process is looking up the actual address itself and passing this back to the envelope reading machine which would then have to print (say, spray) some information about the actual address onto the envelope and route the letter through to the right geographical region for its intended destination.

Looking at it, the computing technologies such as bar coding, databases and high specification PCs have now evolved to the stage where the implementation of personal postal addresses is achievable within acceptable service levels, and given volume, at reasonable cost.

One day the process for routing paper-based letters will be as flexible as that used to route electronic mail across the Internet, if not as cheap or fast. We will all have personal postal addresses and will be able to keep in touch with those people we meet on holiday or in school. We will be able to concentrate on generating the content and not have to worry about the addressing. Having written our letters and cards, we can be reassured that the recipients will get them.

Paper-based mail may travel at the speed of a snail, but at least one day it will follow a trail.

Author: Simon Buckingham

What do you think?

To make a comment to the author, send e-mail to simon@unorgan.com

 

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