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

Welcome to the club

[analog_line]

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.

Trunk Hunting

[nuxx]

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.

Re:Why the '1' ??

[jdreed1024]

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.

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.

Re:Better Idea

[Jugalator]

Yes, using IPv6 where the phones are of course connected to a DNS as well is an interesting thought... An international standard for how to "build" these "dial addresses" would be useful as well. They could reuse country codes too. My phone number could be something like:

<number>.pitea.bd.se

"pitea" is the city. "bd" is for Norrbotten, the equivalent of a state in the USA. "se" is Sweden.

Quite short for being international too and you'd just need to add a number when necessary (i.e. not restricted to a special format of, say, 9 digits).

But there might be some "funny" moments when someone hack the DNS to redirect a "phone address" to a pr0n number, redir CowboyNeal's number to Hilary Rosen, etc. :-(

Or if a DNS with its backups get an error and you have to phone using IPv6 format to get to the right place: 3ffe:8114:2000:240::1 ... eww