Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 17, 1993 TAG: 9303170040
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
NEW AREA CODES NOT JUST DRY DIGITS
You may take your telephone area code for granted, but lots of thought goes into figuring out what parts of the country get what numbers and why. Furthermore, the supply of area codes as we know them, with ones and zeroes in the middle, is exhausted.So, this week at a suburban Virginia hotel, the first-ever "Future of Numbering Forum" will be hosted by Bellcore, the research arm of the nation's regional telephone companies. Its mission: to figure out who gets 640 new area codes with the numbers 2 through 9 in the middle.
This is of more than passing interest to players in the telecommunications industry, where new area codes mean new customers. They all have taken their calculators and figured that 640 new area codes, each with 792 new exchanges and up to 10,000 new phone numbers in each exchange, adds up to 5 billion new telephone numbers.
It may sound like a lot, but the number wizards at Bellcore figure the supply will cover only about 30 years of growth.
The three-day meeting promises to be a heated one. There are strong opinions among the folks at Bellcore's North American Numbering Plan Administration, the long-distance phone companies, local phone companies, paging companies, mobile services companies and cellular phone companies over how the numbers should be assigned.
"We're hoping it doesn't get out of hand," said Barbara Kaufman, a spokeswoman for Bellcore. "There are a lot of emotional components associated with area codes."
A case in point was when part of the 213 area code in California was changed to 310. "It caused a riot," she said. "People thought it would depress their property values."