Posted on 07/23/2006 4:15:21 PM PDT by South40
LOS ANGELES – Starting Wednesday, seven-digit dialing will be a thing of the past for a broad swath of coastal Los Angeles County.
Residents of such posh enclaves as Santa Monica, Malibu and Brentwood will be among the first Californians to be required to dial 11 digits each time they pick up the phone, even if they are calling a next-door neighbor.
The change comes as part of the state's first-ever area code overlay, in which future phone numbers within a region receive a new area code while existing numbers keep the old one. It contrasts with the more common area code split, in which a region is divided and each new geographic area gets its own area code. The overlay of 424 on the 310 area code is taking effect after a lengthy fight, and many of those who resisted it have a message for consumers and business owners in other parts of California.
“I would imagine that, especially in heavily populated areas like L.A. and San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area, that this is going to happen more and more,” said Kathryn Dodson, president of the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce. “So our annoyance is going to eventually become everyone's annoyance.”
Critics of the overlay cite the hassle of mandatory 11-digit dialing – which the Federal Communications Commission requires with overlays in order to preserve competition among phone companies – as well as the time and energy residents must expend updating speed-dial and cellular directories.
Phone companies counter that overlays are more convenient than splits because businesses can keep their existing numbers and therefore do not have to update stationery and notify clients.
Still, critics also say the overlay could be dangerous because some security systems rely on phone lines that dial automatically, and because some elderly or disabled people may adjust poorly to the change.
Then there's the prestige factor.
“People are very aware of the 310 area code,” said Darren Lewis, a manager in the music industry who works in Santa Monica. “It has a cachet.”
Now, if Lewis adds another phone line to his office, it will start with 424, which he expects will confuse the many people he deals with on the East Coast.
“People are going to wonder where you are,” he said.
Every area code in the United States has just under 8 million usable numbers, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Overlay critics acknowledge that population growth and the spread of new technology have the potential to tap out the supply in bustling regions, but they have suggested that phone companies still have many unused numbers.
Industry officials deny they are hoarding phone numbers and cast the overlay as the least onerous solution to a very real problem.
“Absolutely we are reaching capacity in this area code,” said Verizon spokesman Jon Davies. “We were reaching capacity about six years ago.”
Much of Los Angeles was covered by the 213 area code until the 310 was created for the city's west side in 1991. The 310 area code was split in 1997, when the 562 code was added.
Soon after that, the telecommunications industry began pushing state regulators for an overlay in the rapidly growing region, which stretches from Los Angeles' wealthy coastal communities to Compton and south Los Angeles.
Consumer activists and politicians mobilized against the plan, however, and in 1999 the California Public Utilities Commission voted 3-2 to halt it. At the state's behest, phone companies found other ways to conserve numbers.
Such efforts helped California continue to stave off overlays even as they spread to other states, including New York, Ohio, Maryland, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
However, geographic splits continued throughout California, creating smaller and smaller area code boundaries. Meanwhile, the phone companies continued to complain of shrinking rosters of available numbers, and last year the CPUC took up another 310 overlay request.
“We've extended the life of the area code for those six years, but now, once again, demand for cell phones and pagers and fax machines and all the new technology that's coming down the line has really taken over the availability of numbers,” said Verizon spokesman Davies.
State Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, sees it differently.
“Some of this is the old boy crying wolf problem,” she said. “Some of the carriers were screaming they didn't have numbers, and here it's been seven years and nobody's been denied a telephone number in the 310 area code.”
Despite the renewed objections of Bowen and other politicians and chambers of commerce, the CPUC voted unanimously to approve the plan last August.
Analysts see a number of reasons why the overlay passed this time, from the new political makeup of the CPUC and divisions among critics to the ever-increasing pressures of population and technology.
My relatives in the DC metro area have been doing that for a while, too. Forever between Maryland, DC, and Virginia, and for a couple years now to everyone else in the Virginia 'burbs.
Also, about ten years ago, there were several phone outages in Northern VA, where you could still call DC and MD, but not anyone else in Virginia. Then it was announced that local in-state calls would go through if one did use the area code.
Everywhere I have lived since then, anytime there are phone system problems, I try dialing the area code first with local numbers to see if I can find a circuit to get my call through thataway.
jm
This happened around Chicago a while ago.
No one will notice. You only need update your phone directory once.
713 and 281 are geographical - at least as regards landlines - but 832 is an overlay here.
We are still only dialing 7 locally here in STL..
Does anyone still pay for long distance calls on an individual basis? Here I've got unlimited long distance.
Los Angeles was a lot bigger so since the mid 1939s our number was OLympia 8388 and it was later changed to NOrmandy 48388 and when they instituted area codes they made it 213-664-8388.
Actually, we're up to three hours behind.
The flip side on this is the cell phone explosion... It not really land lines numbers but cell numbers that are eating up area codes... we would have been better off to have cell and land lines have different not intermixed areacodes/prefix like some other country do
So let say you have 310 as an area code... 310 would only be given to land lines ... but if you have a cell in the same area you would has a 3 digit cell network "area code" prefix that would only be for cell phones
The whole idea behind area codes is for a hierarchal routing system or "address" for the call
Just think, if computers could have been programmed to just add one more digit at the end of all numbers, there would be no need to dial 11 digits.
LOL, those old "word" prefixes. We had POplar and DIamond.
Same growing up in Western NC - we had one long ring - two short rings was the other side of the party line. Back when dirt was new... *g
If Mayberry gets another area code, does that mean that the phone company has to hire someone to help Sara?
11? Most of Texas is 10 digit dialing. Where is the extra digit?
at least in that era I knew exactly where anyone was by what their prefix was anywhere in L.A. or Orange County.
What really started to make thing dificult is when they started switching from manual relays to digital relays that took up about 10% of the space and numbers could be changed, hooked up, or disconnected with a simple computer entry.
They took entire areas, shut down the entire system for switch over and you got new numbers from a switching facility that had been converted already.
After they did that you couldn't keep track of where the numbers were.
It was about the same time that they broke up ATT and Pac Bell because we worked on every telephone company building ib L.A. putting in deviding walls so ATT employees couldn't get to Pac Bell employees, what a joke!
My question exactly. Where is the 11th digit coming from?
"How long ago was that switch to 7 in LA?"
It was in the late 1940s as I remember.
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