A second area code taking effect Sunday in a large swath of Chicago’s west suburbs will mean dialing extra digits to make local phone calls.
The 630 area code in DuPage County and the far west suburbs was “exhausted” at the end of June and will be supplemented by 331 for new phone customers, the Illinois Commerce Commission has said.
No current customers have to change numbers and local calls cost the same. But any local calls in the area will have to be made using the full 11-digit number — 1, the area code and the seven-digit number.
The addition of 331 brings the number of area codes in the Chicago area to nine, joining 312, 773, 708, 630, 815, 847, 224 and 779.
Some aren’t happy about the change.
David Kolata, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, said the addition of a new area code is an “unnecessary hassle.”
There are 7.8 million combinations of numbers for each area code, Kolata said, and about 94 million available numbers in Illinois.
“The notion of area code exhaust is purely artificial,” said Kolata, who believes the problem stems from bad policy by federal regulators and hoarding of numbers by the telephone industry.
George Light, a telecommunications analyst for the Illinois Commerce Commission, acknowledged there are many numbers still out there. But he said regulators have simply run out of prefixes — the first three digits of a seven-digit phone number.
Light said prefixes, which are allocated in blocks of 1,000, are unique to specific towns and carriers. In smaller towns, many are left unused, intensifying the shortage.
