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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....
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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
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.
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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.
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> 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
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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.
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.
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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