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

Wow...

[nant]

How can people manage phone numbers that are 11 digits long?? Is whoever controls this sytem doesn't see where this is going? Why isn't anyone trying to come up with a better solution? Thank God this isn't happening here in Israel(well, we Are quite smaller... ;)

Re:In addition

[truthsearch]

There are 8 million people living in NYC. Add a few more million who work there 5 days a week. Add another 1+ million pieces of equipment. Add a few more million from the suburbs who use the same system. You think it's horrible to stick to 11 digits instead of getting all of them to change to 10? How about inconveniencing as few people as possible? We'd rather inconvenience a few torrists. After all NYC is the center of the known universe ;)

All NYC area codes (except for new mobile numbers of which I'm not familiar) are local calls. The area codes are only used within the city. Any other area code is "regional" or long distance. It's quite simple and I've understood it since I was a child.