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."

Comments

Why the '1' ??

[blakespot]

We have had to use 10-digit dialing here in the DC area (I am in Alexandria, VA in NoVA) for a while now and I don't see what adding a 1 is going to do...esp. if you add it to each call.

So 10-digit == 11-digit dialing, basically, no?

blakespot

Miscellaneous

[tommck]

1) Is it me or is everyone in this thread mathematically challenged? Philly doesn't have 11 digit dialing, neither does Massachusetts. They have 10 digit dialing, right?

2) And, if you add the SAME number to the beginning of everything, that gives you nothing. Why would they do that?

3) I used to work on phone switch software, and the only reason I can see is that they don't want to have to differentiate between a local (i.e. 10 digit) call and a long distance (i.e. 11 digit) call. This way, the switch can run less code. No need to wait before it starts routing the call. It can start routing as soon as you start typing numbers. This, and the use of reserved area codes (\d[0,1]\d) as exchanges, was the big motivator behind the 10 digit move.

T