Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 6, 1995                   TAG: 9507060057
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

NUMBER IS UP FOR 800: SAY HELLO TO 888

That's right: 888.

To cope with a rapidly depleting reserve of available toll-free 800 numbers, caused by increasing demand from businesses, pagers, modems and faxes, North American phone companies will add the new prefix 888 to designate toll-free calls starting in April.

The change will cause grief for retailers, who must convince themselves and their customers that 888 is just as useful a service as 800, which will continue to exist. It also poses a problem for phone companies, which face the task of upgrading tens of thousands of switches to accept the 888 area code. When the 888 numbers are exhausted, the industry plans to add 877, then 866 and so on.

``Everybody's going to be affected by this,'' said Daniel Briere, president of TeleChoice Inc., a telecommunications consulting firm in Verona, N.J. ``No one goes through the week without placing an 800 call.''

Sensing the end is near for new 800 numbers, a panic of sorts ensued last month when the nation's largest long-distance and local phone companies with access to the database of available 800 numbers began to stockpile unused number combinations. Those companies together typically reserve roughly 30,000 new 800 numbers every week from the database, but in one week in early June they requested 113,000 numbers.

At that rate, the 800-number pool might have dried up by the end of this month, so the industry called in federal regulators to guard the cache of roughly 900,000 remaining 800 numbers. The Federal Communications Commission immediately put tight limits on how many 800 numbers could be requested. Now, FCC officials say, the dwindling supply should hold out until next April.

Few marketing devices have been as successful as the toll-free 800 number, which was introduced by AT&T Corp. in 1967 and adopted by competitors after the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. Their use has exploded since May 1993, when the FCC ordered carriers to make 800 numbers ``portable,'' meaning businesses could keep their numbers even when they switched phone companies.