THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 10, 1995 TAG: 9507100048
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ROANOKE LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
At a small metal tubing factory in the Roanoke Valley, it's Jennifer Farnham's job to let clients as far away as Australia and Switzerland know the area code in western Virginia is about to change.
The last thing she wants to happen is for buyers to flip through their Rolodex, dial the 703 number for Noble-Met Ltd. and get that ear-numbing, high-low-high whistle followed by the robotic message: ``Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.''
Noble-Met has one of the 1.8 million telephone numbers in the state that will switch from 703 to 540 beginning Saturday. For the next six months, both area codes will work. But at 2 a.m. on Jan. 27, the 703 area code that was once used for all of Virginia will be exclusive to four counties in Northern Virginia.
The new area code is needed because telephone numbers in Virginia are rapidly being depleted as more and more people get pagers, fax machines, cellular telephones and computers with modems.
The 804 area code assigned to central and eastern Virginia in 1972 probably will be split into two area codes in 1998, said Paul Miller, Bell Atlantic's spokesman in Richmond.
``The technology around us is just consuming telephone numbers,'' Miller said.
The border for the 703 area will split Loudoun and Stafford counties and include all of Fairfax and Prince William counties. The 540 area code will be everywhere else in the old 703 area code region, stretching from King George County across the Potomac from Maryland to the Cumberland Gap where Virginia meets Kentucky and Tennessee.
Miller said Virginia's telephone companies agreed that Northern Virginia should keep the old area code because that fast-growing region actually has more telephone numbers than the western half of the state.
The problem ahead, Miller said, ``is notifying the universe.''
So Farnham chose screaming yellow neon for the color of the postcards she mailed last week to spread the word. Then she had to get the company letterhead changed. And the business cards.
``It's going to be a big expense,'' she said, one she hasn't tallied yet.
It's going to be a bigger expense for companies with internal switchboards. They'll have to update their equipment because Virginia is the eighth of 16 states that will get a new area code without a zero or one in the middle this year.
Some companies with old switching equipment will have to replace entire phone systems because old systems are designed to recognize only area codes with zero or one as a middle digit, Miller said.
Other companies with new equipment will just have to reprogram their speed dials and the autodialers on their fax machines.
Then there is the potential loss of business because many companies from outside the region have decided not to spend the money to upgrade their internal switchboards, a according to James Deak of the North American Numbering Plan Administration at Bellcore. The cost ranges from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars.
The biggest logistical headache may be reprogramming about 50,000 cellular telephones that people are now using in the soon-to-be-540 area code.
Contel Cellular of Virginia plans to extend its office hours, send its technicians to shopping malls and fairs and try to get every phone reprogrammed before Thanksgiving.
It takes three to 10 minutes to reprogram a cellular phone. Some can be reprogrammed by just hitting a series of keys on the handset; some older models will need new computer chips.
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA AREA CODE by CNB