cat@tygra.ddmi.com (CAT-TALK Maint. Account) (12/22/90)
For about six months now, Michigan Bell has been enclosing a little sheet with the phone bills entitled "Now's the time to start dialing 1-313", indicating their plans to require people to dial 1-313 for toll calls instead of just "1". Well, our local CO (DTRMINICGO, a #1 ESS) must have just implemented this in the last day, because now whenever I forget the "313", I get a message saying "It is neccessary to dial an area code when making this call. Please hang up and try again". It is REALLY ANNOYING!! Michigan Bell claims that this will somehow allow them to free up about 1.2 million phone numbers. My question is "how"?? They aren't creating a new area code (yet), so how does adding the 313 requirement free up telephone numbers?? John Palmer [Moderator's Note: I think your answer can be found in the discussion the past several days regarding area 215. By adding 1-313 on the front, they will be able to use 'area code look-a-like' numbers for prefixes, i.e. 215 without actually conflicting with area codes. PAT]
wright@ais.org (Carl Wright) (01/07/91)
Re: prefix changes, the BellSouth Open Network Architecture Outlook
newsletter says the following:
"Estimates were that all available NPA codes would be in use by 1995.
However, the economic cruch of the 1980's and the current seven to
nine percent growth in telephone number usage moved that date up. As a
result, Bellcore requires any area code running short of numbers to
convert to Interchangeable Central Office Codes (ICOC).
Under this plan, converted NPAs may use "0" and "1" as the middle
digit of central office codes (the first three numbers of the seven
digit phone number).
This conversion creates 152 new central office codes, just over a
million phone numbers per area code, and extends the life of the
existing area codes."
They went on to say that Georgia converted to ICOC in October 1989,
North Carolina in March 1990, and Alabama should be converted by
January 1991.
Interested parties should also see the article in {Telephony} dated
12/24/90, page 11 titled "North America Faces Number Crunch". It also
discusses how Mexico is losing its NPAs.