Additional telephone area codes in Chicago and other urban centers may be only Phase One in complicating the lives of weary phone consumers.
The next thing you know, phone numbers themselves will likely get longer.
Phone industry representatives at the national level are considering adopting four-digit area codes and eight-digit local numbers to deal with the continuing depletion of unused phone numbers in America’s metropolitan areas.
The best news at the moment for American phone users is that it’s unlikely that they’ll ever have to dial more than 12 digits to make a call anywhere within North America. That’s because international agreements limit how many digits a country can cram into one phone number, said James Deak, manager for the North American Numbering Plan Administration, which oversees phone number use for the industry.
Most industry people already expect that soon phone users in urban America will routinely dial 10 digits every time they make a local call, using their area code plus the local number even to ring up their next door neighbor.
“The cognoscenti of telecommunications feel that 10-digit dialing is inevitable,” said Deak. “Will the public accept that without kicking and screaming? No. But that’s the industry’s thinking.”
In the long run, even dialing 10 digits for every call won’t be enough, said Deak, as sometime early in the next century three-digit combinations of area codes will run out. So it’s likely that four-digit area codes will be instituted. Or maybe four-digit prefixes, or five-digit line numbers.
But whatever happens, the total mustn’t exceed 12 digits, said Deak, whose agency is a unit of Bellcore, the software and consulting company once owned by the Baby Bell phone companies that is in the process of being sold.
To many observers, industry’s short-sightedness in the matter of phone numbers is ironic. Had phone companies introduced an eight-digit local phone number a few years ago as many other countries did, the proliferation of area codes would have been unnecessary.
“They could have added a zero or a one to the end of everybody’s phone number a few years ago, and that would have increased the number supply by a factor of ten,” said A. Edward Evenson, a retired engineer in Rolling Meadows who is writing a book on telephone history.
“Had they done that, we’d have plenty of numbers now and we’d all still be in the 312 area code.”
In hindsight, the area code proliferation that plagues urban America developed because the phone industry didn’t directly address number shortages in big cities when they first appeared.
“It was easier in Los Angeles or Chicago to just add another area code and keep the seven-digit local number,” said Evenson, “so that’s what they did.”
Giving the Chicago region a second area code six years ago doubled the supply of available phone numbers, which seemed like a lot back then, but last year the region got three more area codes because the phone number supply was again in a crunch.
Altogether, the new area codes have increased the region’s phone number supply by a factor of four, but had local numbers added a digit back when the problem first arose, and kept the single 312 area code, our phone number supply would have grown by a factor of 10.
“A longer local number would have retained the geographic significance of area codes,” said Isaac Abella, a physics professor at the University of Chicago. “We’ve lost that now. If you try to call someone you know lives on the Near North Side, you don’t know if his code is 773 or 312. There are so many codes in the suburbs, you can’t remember them all.”
Unfortunately, even though the industry is now debating an expansion of local phone numbers, it probably won’t be adopted soon enough to solve the Chicago region’s continuing phone number crunch.
Deak said that even if longer phone numbers were embraced tomorrow, it would take years of work to reprogram and, in some cases, replace the hundreds of thousands of switches connected to the North American telephone network.
“It’s a big, big jump to equip the network to handle anything greater than ten digits,” Deak said.
Because longer phone numbers are in the cards anyway, that’s all the more reason why Illinois regulators should insist that phone companies adopt practices to conserve the phone numbers now available and put off the need to deploy more area codes here, said Seamus Glynn, an analyst with the Citizens Utility Board.
Even though there are now more than 40 million phone numbers available to the Chicago region and less than 12 million actually in use, the industry fears that the number supply will be exhausted by next year in the 847 area and by the year after that in 630.
Glynn said that inefficient number use was underscored by the recently announced deal whereby Ameritech Corp. will take over service provided in the Chicago area by Centel/Sprint Corp.
While Centel/Sprint serves only 136,000 lines, it has a stockpile of some 350,000 phone numbers.
“In Centel we have an established dominant carrier with little competition, and they are only using about 40 percent of the available numbers,” said Glynn.
An analysis by Glynn of Ameritech’s use of numbers in the 630 area code also suggests that it uses only about 40 percent of the available numbers. And yet industry officials have warned that the 630 area could run dry of numbers the year after next.
“The problem is definitely not just the growing use of phone technology by the public,” said Glynn. “Even if consumer demand grew at the rate of 10 percent a year, we shouldn’t be running out of new numbers just a year or two after introducing three new area codes to the region.
“The real problem is wasted numbers.”
CUB is developing a proposal to submit to the Illinois Commerce Commission that would require phone companies to pool unused phone numbers instead of handing them out in blocks of 10,000 at a time.
