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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."
Why not just give every phone an IP adress?
In Massachussetts, we've had 11-digit dialing required for at least a year. I'm suprised that New York is just getting to this point. There's a whole lot more phones in NYC than here.
... and except for the week it happened (and listening to the "you must dial the area code" message umpteen times because your fingers arent trained to dial the extra 3 digits to call down the street), it isnt so bad. In fact, down south they have a very large local calling area, which more than makes up for having to dial extra digits. I dont know about New Yorks call pricings, but who cares if you have to dial a "1" before every call now, as long as its not considered a toll call.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Easy solution... Just call up your phone company and tell them you want trunk hunting set up across the three lines that you have. In my experience this hasn't cost any extra, and it'll cause one number to roll over to the next phones if the first is busy.
Is this what you're looking to do? It works well and doesn't cost anything.
In Europe the cell numbers are separate from home lines, so you know when you are calling a cell or not.
Here in America all the numbers are mixed so when you dial a number you can't be that sure it's a cell. This has caused the numbers to fill up FAST.
Based on anecdotal evidence, I beleive that the various phone companies are hording number exchanges. Here in Chicago, there are many prefixes that are not available in adjacent area codes. It goes along with the general take no prisoner's approach the various ILEC's take in dealing with competition.
Somebody help me get a clue: At first glance, it would seem that a seven digit number would be good for almost 10 million phone numbers, while adding three more digits would take us up to more than one phone number per inhabitant of our planet.
Why so many digits? Why are we running out of phone numbers?
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? I'd imagine that modern telco equipment could support this by now.
Why is whenever the US catches up with the rest of the world in phone technology it is considered "news"?
We've been using 11 digit number in the UK for years. A 5 digit area code and a 6 digit number. It's not exactly a hard concept to grasp.
So is NANPA still requiring each line provider to buy a block of numbers and assign their users out of that block?
Are they blocking number portability? That is, can I take a Verizon number that I've had for years at my business and sign up with a dial tone competitor and keep the same number? (Yes, phone switches are smart enough to handle this and route a number anywhere on to any network.)
With Michael Powell at the FCC as a sock puppet of the RBOCs, things like number portability that might promote dial tone competition get squashed. It would also reduce the need for new area codes because the numbers that we do have would get used more efficiently.
But it is easier to get customers to carry the burden and expense of dialing extra digits (think of reprogramming speed dial numbers and fax numbers on machines). Then you can minimize competition and keep profits and campaign contributions maximized.
Yeah, same in Boston. We recently got some new area codes added to our local calling area, so we have to dial 10 digits instead of the previous 7. We certainly don't have to dial the '1'.
By contrast, however, in Rhode Island (401 for the whole state), when New England Telephone became NYNEX (yes, it was always a subsidiary, but when they actually changed the name), we had to dial '1' + 7 digits if we were calling outside our local calling area, but within 401. Then they became Bell Atlantic, and we had to dial 1+401+7 digits outside the local calling area (but within 401). Then they became verizon, and now you just dial 7 digits anywhere within 401, and it's up to you to remember whether it's a local call or a toll call.
So, I think basically the "1" is at the whim of the phone companies, and it is no longer the reserved digit signifying "long distance". Unless of course the NYT got it wrong. Someone who works for the phone companies (or has hacked into their switches - Hi Kevin!) should explain to us why New Yorkers need to dial a 1 when they have overlay codes, and those of us elsewhere (Boston, DC) don't.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
New York has not REQUIRED 11 digit dialing for dialing in your area code, but there are now five area codes in New York City, 212/646 overlap, 718/347 overlap, and 917 is a little up in the air right now but was originally for cell phones, pagers and faxes.
646 has at least been planned for at least 8 years I would say, and now many people in Manhattan have 646 area codes for their home phone. 347 is also appearing in Brooklyn. 917 has been a national oddity for longer than I can remember. I would say 10 years minimum, probably longer.
Thus you only need to 11 digit dial when you are dialing someone who does not have a number in YOUR area code.
It seems really ridiculous to require 11 digit dialing in your own area code. Perhaps if we didn't USE area codes but had an entirely random string numbers 11 digit dialing as a requirement is obviously a necessity.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Unless you make hours of local calls every week, you might want to check if your telco has a plan where *all* calls are toll. This usually costs nine or ten bucks a month plus only pennies per call -- by far the cheapest plan for most people (assuming you have broadband and no teenage children).
My idea from years ago that I still haven't seen implemented: add a star code that means "don't deliver this call, just tell me the rate lookup for it".
So before you call that new number, you do *xx, get the stutter dial tone, then dial the new number. The switch routes it somewhere else, and the far end reads it back to you: "fifteen cents per minute".
This should work both for intrastate stuff (aka "10 inches no lube rates") and the rest that goes through your separate long distance company.
I've been waiting at least 10 years for this. I used to run a BBS that made a bunch of calls to throw netmail around, and it would have made my life a lot easier.
Bonus points for having another star code which returns the same data as some kind of encoded data, ala caller-ID bursts. The computerized dialer (COCOTs, etc) people would probably cream their pants with something like this available.
Computers today are easily capable of dealing with the problem on a finer grained basis. For example, a cheap home PC can store and retrieve info concerning tens of millions of phone numbers in real time. Each new phone number could be allocated from a central source individually. No big deal.
Another thing that bothers me is that if you have a dial 7 area, you often can't dial 11. I should be able to dial the country code too! The phone number should be an address, not a route. I don't want to hear "You must dial a one...". If the computer knows I needed it, it should just complete the call.
On my cell phone, I always put in the dial 11, so that it still works when dialing from out of the home network. Don't dial by number, look it up by name and tell it to get a connection.
What I want is to be able to copy my phone book between my home phone, cell phone and, for editing, my computer.
-- Stephen.
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, but now they're a local call.
Look, it's trying to think - Albert Rosenfield
I live in the 510 area code, near San Francisco, where Pacific Bell tried to force 11 digit dialing on us a while back. Their reasoning went something like this:
1. We need more phone numbers.
2. We'll add a new "overlay" area code, meaning that it covers the same geographical area as the existing area code.
3. People won't remember to dial the new 1+areacode, because they're used to dialing only the last 7 digits when calling within their own geographical area.
4. We should therefore force customers to dial 1+areacode with every call, even when it's technically unnecessary, to train them into using the extra digits.
This, of course, was offensive to those of us in the area who consider ourselves less stupid than Pac Bell assumes. Many of us are perfectly capable of dialing the extra digits when necessary, even for local numbers, and were annoyed at the prospect of having arbitrary inconvenience forced onto us. As I remember it, enough of us complained that Pac Bell got the message, and changed their policy.
The worst part in Boston is that you *must* use the initial 1 if you dial "long distance" and you *can not* use the 1 if you are dialing locally, or you'll get anyone of "that number can not be reached" errors. This is super confusing because there are instances where someone is across the street but has a different area code so you need the one, or there is someone who is far away, but has the same area code and you need the one, or someone is nearby with the same area code and you can not use the one.
So confusing, I remember that I was calling a local Boston number that for weeks I thought was incorrect because I was dialing a 1 first and eventually I learned that it was because I was dialing the one that it didn't work.
Technically I think the best way of writing it is: +44 +20 7124 4567, as is the normal practice here in New Zealand. Here we have a nice simple system... an area code which is 0,[3,4,6,7,9]. So it's either 03, 04, 06, 07 or 09. This is followed by a 7 digit number. There are two 'exceptions': the mobile prefix, which is 0,2,[1-9] (where the 3rd digit tells you it's either vodafone cellular, telecom paging, telecom's TDMA network, telecom's CDMA network, or TelstraClear's part of vodafone cellular). There is also 0800 and 0508, which are both free calling (ie. costs the caller nothing), and 0900, which has a specific per minute charge. Of course, here, if the number is 'local' you do not dial the area code. Simple as that. And it costs the same to call a mobile no matter where in the country they are, so it's always 'national' rather than local. And, calling internationall is simply a matter of 00[countrycode][areacode][localnumber]. So you always know where you are calling, and it's easy to do.
Sometimes bad things happen.