rmadison@euler.berkeley.edu (Linc Madison) (10/17/89)
I had a little time to kill this weekend, so I did a little research, with a little help from two Oakland directories (June 1988 & 1989) and one San Francisco (Sept. 1989). In the one-year span between the two Oakland books, 29 prefixes were added. At that rate of consumption, the supply of NNX prefixes would've been exhausted by mid-1992. If 415 weren't being split, the supply of NXX codes would run out by about 1996. I went a bit deeper, though. Area 415 includes one area north of San Francisco, Marin County. Everything else north to the Oregon border is 707. Seemed logical to me that Marin should've been thrown in with the relatively uncrowded 707. It turns out that out of 30-odd prefixes in Marin and about 130 in A/C 707, there are only 7 duplications -- *all* in San Rafael on the 415 side. Neither area has significant growth in number of prefixes assigned. The other interesting thing to note is which N0X/N1X prefixes are coming on line first. The first three were 302, 502, and 709. The next few include 506, 516, 601, 705, and 706. The interesting part comes from looking at the NPAs corresponding to these combinations: Delaware, western Kentucky, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Long Island, Mississippi, northern central Ontario, and northwest Mexico (hack). All except for 516 are areas of low population where people in this area are relatively unlikely to call. (In fact, the way I found the last five is that if you dial, for example, 214-XXXX, the system waits for you to dial the last three digits so it can give you its "You moron, dial 1 first" recording.) I'm just curious why Pac*Bell decided to pick on Lawn Guy Land ;-) Linc Madison = rmadison@euler.berkeley.edu