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11 Digit Dialing Comes Home to New York
Traicovn writes "The NY Times (free registration, yadda yadda) is carrying an article about 11 digit dialing coming to the city of New York for all phone calls, including inner city calls. Yes, that means even to dial across the street you will have to dial 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx. Eventually as the phone number system fills up because of more people having cellphones/pager/fax and a home/office phone line we may see this happening in more cities across the nation or the NANPA may have to intervene by making phone numbers longer in general."
Start supporting number-sharing? I have 3 phone lines, but only one of them is ever used to receive calls....
Clear, Dark Skies
Why do they have to dial 1? In Toronto and Vancouver (Canada) they have had their area codes overlaid for quite some time and they only have to dial 10 digits.
Here in the UK, major cities have had to change their numbers twice in recent years to accomodate number growth. It's not such a big deal, though. At present london numbers are 11 digits long 020x xxx xxxx , though the 020 can be omitted when dialling locally. Shouldn't the surprise be that this hasn't happened sooner?
Not only do we have 11 digit dialing, we have multiple area codes in MA that are the SAME AREA! Such as 508/774, 781/339. Somone with a new phone number accros the street from my parents (who have 508) could get a 774 number. (its not long distance).
:P) Verizon is looking at converting most areas. After all, it is so hard for a telephone switch to detect that a number being dialed is 7 rather than 11 digits......
I'm in western MA right now, and there is only one area code out here, 413. From what I hear from the phone companies though, since Boston went so well converting us to 11 digits, (aside from the many complaints
Here
Paul
Why 11 vs 10 digits? I can only think of two reasons. Either there are enough area codes in the local area that they don't want to waste the exchange codes, or they need a new area code and don't want to force the people who have it as their exchange to change their 7-digit number.
And now that I've gone all through this, the sometimes-10, sometimes-7 digit dialing that IIRC is used in the Dallas Metroplex area vs always-10 digits still doesn't make a case for needing the 1 in front. In fact, without the 1, 7-digit dialing could still be assumed. So I'm still just as confused as you are.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Why are we running out of phone numbers?
I am not sure how they do things in New York, but down here in Pennsylvania, any time a competing local exchange carrier or a cell phone carrier wants to provide service, they must buy the numbers from Verizon in 10000-sized blocks (1 entire prefix), even if they end up selling only 1 to 9999 lines. When they deregulated the phone system in this state, lots of companies bought up these blocks but never resold anything close to same amount to end-customers. The result (at least in Philadelphia) is that we now have 6 area codes for the city (215, 267 and 445) and suburban (610, 484 and 835) areas although there hasn't been a net gain in population in this region (mostly people moving out of the city and into the suburbs). I read somewhere that they are trying to reduce the block sizes down to 1000 numbers, but I am not sure how this is progressing.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
And now that I've gone all through this, the sometimes-10, sometimes-7 digit dialing that IIRC is used in the Dallas Metroplex area vs always-10 digits still doesn't make a case for needing the 1 in front. In fact, without the 1, 7-digit dialing could still be assumed. So I'm still just as confused as you are.
The Dallas Metroplex has 10 digit dialing. There are 3 area codes (214, 972, 469). So you always have to dial 10 digits. I don't see what 11 digits buys new york over 10 though, cause if the first digit is always 1 then effectively you have gained nothing over just adding another area code.
We carry Mobile phones which have this cool feature called an 'Address Book' where you can store all your friends numbers. And another feature called a 'Call List' where you can dial numbers that a) you have recently dialled or b) have recently called you.
/b
Seriously this accounts for 90% of the calls I make. Most calls involve pressing 'Yes' on my phone followed by the first letter of the persons name and then yes again.
Another cool feature is directory assistance where they just SMS you the number and you dial straight from your phone (They can also connect you but that costs a lot more).
Who needs a landline when you have all your numbers at your fingertips?
[Please type your sig here.]
No, the problem is that when US telcos "reserve" phone numbers, they reserve them in blocks of 10,000. So let's say that in a given area code, in a large city, that a company like AT&T will reserve 1,000,000 numbers. That leave only 9,000,000 for everyone else. It does not cost AT&T much, if at all, anything to not put those numbers into service, nor can they be compelled currently to release some of those numbers they are not using. When you add all the competing telcos, especially in a "hot" area code like 312, 212, 213, etc., doing the same thing...
While the excuse by the telcos is given that there are all these new telephonic devices that each require a number, at least here in 847 land, the reality when the state of Illinois tried to fight the 847 overlay is that there were so many unused numbers that the various telcos wouldn't release (which also prevented a split in the area code), the overlay was decided as the "best" option.
I wonder if there are any two-line homes now with one phone number in 847 and the other one in the new overlay area code...
One big factor is the way numbers are allocated. For historical reasons, numbers are grouped: every number with an XYZ prefex gets routed to the XYZ exchange. Once you placed an exchange somewhere, it had 10^5 phone numbers available, whether it needed them or not. I think you'll still find a lot of prefixes that haven't been filled yet.
A similar thing happens when netblocks are given to companies. If a company needs 1500 phone lines, 10,000 numbers are reserved (think about it as applying a decimal netmask).
Now that phone exchanges are mostly digital (over here, the last analog exchange was phased out years ago, IDK about the US, though), it should be possible to free up those unused numbers.
There are more reasons: at least over here, many numbers are 'locked away' in unused 'prepaid' SIM cards for cellphones. In the US, I expect that rivalry between phone companies will prevent them sharing their number pools.
> Why are we running out of phone numbers?
It has to do with the fact that service providers are assigned blocks of numbers, rather than individual numbers for their subscribers. So imagine two service providers A and B. Maybe they both get a single 10,000 block of phone numbers. Imagine that A has 9,000 subscribers (and thus has used 90%) of their numbers, and B has 1,000 subscribers (and has used 10%). If A gains another 2,000 subscribers, they can't use B's number block. They have to apply to the FCC for another block of 10,000 numbers. In the meantime, B is has plenty of room. As a result, you run out of numbers, even though they're not all being used.
Their is a concept called Number Pooling that means that if a service provider has a block of 1,000 numbers that they aren't using, they have to return that block of numbers to the "pool" for other service providers to use. Number Pooling is mandated in many areas under specific circumstances.
The telecom industry is slowly getting away from the idea of number block routing. With Number Portability and Number Pooling, they're moving towards a system that improves on that. Number blocks are "tagged" as having a subscriber that no longer has service with the service provider that owns that block. Then the switch goes to a centralized database and determines where that subscriber is, and the call is routed accordingly.
Number Portability exists in a limited extent today, so in many areas of the country when you move between service providers (but stay in the same service area), you can keep your phone number. So the situation is being alleviated, but New York is probably the biggest market in the country, and things are pretty strained there.
> And, while we're at it, why not assign each
> individual a phone number that they keep for
> life, no matter where they move, like a domain
> name?
Telecom companies are working on this. A concept called ENUM allows subscribers to be assigned IP addresses that are abstracted from the ways the actual call is routed. This is mostly coming about because of VoIP, but it has merits with regular E.164 telephone numbers as well. The telecom industry moves a little slower than the computer industry, so expect to see something like this within 3-5 years. Happy waiting!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Area codes USED to be: [2-9][0,1][1-9]
Exchanges were: [2-9][2-9][0-9] ( i think - foggy memory )
This made them easily recognizable to the switch.
Recently, many areas of the US switched to 10 digit dialing.
The new area codes are: [2-9][0-9][0-9] (many more)
the new exchanges are: [0-9][0-9][0-9] (many more)
NOW, they're setting up for MORE area codes so that we can have:
1 - [0-9][0-9][0-9] - [0-9][0-9][0-9] - [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]
I'm not doing the math for you , but that's a lot more numbers than previously allowed.
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Before you go running in the streets naked yelling Eureka, consider the privacy implication of the said technology and other related issues. Google it. Thanks.
Nevertheless, the area code system in the US seems to be a bit of a mess (at least by looking from the other side of the atlantik.. ;) ). To use 2 or more area code for the same area is somehow strange. In Germany we have one prefix code per area, longer once for rural areas, shorter ones for large cities (to allow for a larger number space with the same total number of digits). So 030 is Berlin, 089 is Munich, while all numbers starting with 08xyy (where y=[0-8]) are numbers around Munich.
1 is the country code for the NANP (North American Numbering Plan) but that isn't applicable to calls within the USA. The leading 1 in a telephone number was originally a way to route the call to a toll (long distance) switch, back when telephone switches were electro-mechanical, using relays and stepper switches. They had to keep the call-handling logic as simple as possible. Today, some areas misuse it as an indication to the caller that the call is not a local call. The one meaning that is universal, except in those areas misusing it as a toll indicator, is that a leading 1 means that the switch can expect to receive 10 more digits. This means that the switch does not have to use a timeout timer to know when the caller has finished dialing the number.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Why does a person need three numbers? Why does a business need 200?
They don't. Pretty much any business with 200 or more phone lines will use PRIs. A PRI is a T1 line (24 channels) to the phone company. So your business would have 9 PRIs coming in, for a total of 216 channels. A PRI channel allows for an outgoing call, but it does NOT have its own phone number. The way it works is that the business buys a block of DID numbers, however many they need, and those get routed over the PRI. An incoming call to one of those numbers uses whatever channel is available and sends a signal to your PBX identifying which number was dialed. This is much more efficient and cost effective than the single line / phone number model.
So no businness in their right mind would have 200 individual phone lines dropped in a single location. It's just inefficient and a management nightmare.
'Why not just give every phone an IP adress?'
http://www.vonage.com/
This actually had nothing to do with not having enough phone numbers here in NYC. The FCC decided that Verizon had an unfair advantage since it owned most all 212 numbers. In case you don't know, 212 was originally the only area code in Manhattan, and this is where big business is. For companies that got numbers other than 212, they had to deal with 11 digit dialing for most business to business calls. This made 212 numbers coveted by the business sector. In an attempt to balance this out the FCC ruled that all calls now need to use the full 11 digits.
This is a bit of a pain to me, since I work as the IT manager at a Call Center in Manhattan. Everything we do has a phone number associated with it. This means that all of the 2000+ phone numbers we own, plus any of our clients numbers, stored in any one of 30 different places need to be checked to make sure that the full area code is being used.
If you must!
Here in Montana, where we have only one area code (and still span a time zone), the phone company just reduced the number of digits we have to dial: calls to Billings (90 miles away) used to require the area code (10 digits), but now they're a local call (7 digits).
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
You, kryonD, are absolutely right (and perceptive) to note that the number of digits is hardly justified, except that the numbers in question are divided among localized geographical areas in an arrangement from a time where phones were much thinner on the ground.
If memory serves, once upon a time, the individual exchanges were nice, neat affairs where human operators interfaced with the system directly, placing and connecting calls through switchboards, with small phone numbers preceded by a few digits which indicated the exchange of the call's recipient. These early prefixes often formed a mnemonic reference; 'Operator, please give me, "Butterfield-six-three-three..."'
The ineficiencies you point out seem to be the result of a system with a lot of built-in legacy thinking which points back to far less sophisticated technologies.
Basically, if everyone in the country, or on earth shared one phone system, putting us all under one umbrella from New York and on to far Beijing, a rationalized system would work but you would be very hard pressed to interest anyone in establishing one.
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The number of numbers has nothing to do with superiority, it just tells you the maximum number of unique telephone numbers. ;-)
At the start of the 80's, London (UK) had 7-digit numbers served by a single "city" code of 01, so a typical inner city London number would be of the format 01 123 4567. This number would work from anywhere in the country.
By the end of the 80's, an increase in the volume of dedicated lines and faxes meant that the city was running out of numbers.
First, London was split into two regions, inner and outer. Inner was given the prefix 071 and outer 081. This was changed about three years later to 0171 and 0181 before changing again a few years later to 0207 and 0208. So if you were an inner-city business, your number changed from 01 123 4567 to 071 123 4567 to 0171 123 4567 and finally to 020 7123 4567 in the space of about 12 years.
All thanks to the wonderful people at OFTEL, the UK Telecommunications regulator.
Perhaps the most useful number change in the UK happened a few years ago when all mobile numbers were changed to begin with 07. That way, a mobile number is always immediately identifiable.
We have had 10 digit dialing here in Atlanta since before I moved here 2+ years ago. Nice thing about it is that if you are making a real long distance call, then you dial the 1-xxx-xxx-xxxx. Otherwise, you just dial area code + 7 digits. May not be really different, but it does seem nicer to me. I know what is long distance and what isn't automatically. Of course, we only have 3 area codes presently.
I'll never be as good as I want to be. I can only be as good as I am.
This is what they do in the UK. Numbers start 00 for international (which is standard), 01 and 02 for national numbers and 07 for mobile devices like pagers (there's only about 30 or so in use now, but some people won't give them up) and mobile phones.
All the different mobile phone companies are then assigned number ranges within the 07 group, like Orange is 078 and 079, kind of thing.
2) And, if you add the SAME number to the beginning of everything, that gives you nothing. Why would they do that?
Actually it does give you something. It will allow you to use 0 or 1 as the second digit -- thus *buying* 2 billion more phone numbers.
Of course, globally routing numbers (drop the concept of 'area code', and just make it 3 arbitrary numbers) would do more for the system.
Rod Taylor
It's only 10 digit. You don't have to dial the 1 if you're calling between 416, 905 and 647 (I think that's the new one).
-- "Is this death or is this Ohio?"
First off, the song was set in New Jersey.
212 used to be used for the entire state of New York.
201 used to be used for the entire state of New Jersey (and it was at the time the song was written)
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