Sig...you buying here at the high...or waiting for a bump in the road.............?......here's an item that needs to be addressed...........tim......................................................................S A N F R A N C I S C O, Aug. 18 ? In California,
certain area codes are not only chic; they?re also
increasingly scarce.
Local signature area codes like San Francisco?s 415,
San Jose?s 408 and Oakland?s 510 are now ?in
jeopardy? and subject to rationing. In telecommunications
industry parlance, jeopardy means that new telephone
numbers in those area codes are being snapped up faster
than new ones become available. Even the recently
established 650 area code in Palo Alto is running out of
new numbers.
The proliferation of communications gadgets for the
wired generation is only partly responsible for the
shortage. Every one of those handy pay-at-the-pump gas
pumps, for example, uses an individual telephone number
? and there are more remote payment systems in
California than in any other state.
The result is that, once again, California is at the
forefront of a widespread crisis: the increasing scarcity of
new telephone numbers in the United States. Other
populous states, such as Florida, New York and Texas,
are facing similar numbers crunches.
Handout System Part of the Problem
It?s unfair to blame the cellular set alone for the shortage
of available telephone numbers. Mathematically speaking,
there are plenty of 10-digit sequences to go around.
Shortages stem from infrastructure capacity problems; the
quicker consumption of phone numbers by an increasingly
technology-driven population has only sped up the
inevitable.
?Californians in particular are number-intensive,? says
Natalie Billingsley, a regulatory analyst for the California
Public Utilities Commission. ?But the single biggest culprit
is the inefficiency of handing out the numbers,?
The North American Numbering Plan, the system that
established area codes and prefixes, was put into place in
1947 ? long before demand for phone lines became
insatiable. The Numbering Plan, which covers the North
American continent, doles out phone numbers within an
area code based on prefixes ? the three digits in a phone
numbers that appear before the hyphen. Each area code
has 792 prefixes; each prefix contains 10,000 assigned
seven-digit phone numbers.
The federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, besides
opening up the telephone industry to new competitors,
also awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. the job of doling
out phone numbers. New local phone companies joined
the cellular and pager companies in requesting phone
numbers.
Because of the installed electronic switches that route
calls and keep billing records, prefixes are assigned to
specific geographical locations. So whenever a telephone
carrier needs access to a specific geographic region, it?s
awarded one of the prefixes, which automatically comes
with 10,000 phone numbers regardless of how many
customers a company may have in the area. In California,
there are 220 phone companies vying for the blocks of
10,000. In cities like San Jose and San Francisco,
companies must enter lotteries for the monthly rations of
prefixes. In San Jose, the companies have to share six
new prefix awards allowed per month; in San Francisco
the monthly ration is 11 prefixes.
The inefficient awarding of blocks of 10,000, instead
of proposed blocks of 1,000, leaves thousands of
numbers unused. Pacific Bell, the Bay Area?s longtime
telephone company, uses 70 percent of its alloted 7-digit
numbers. Smaller companies, awarded the blocks to
serve customers in different geographic regions, may have
far lower utilization rates because of fewer customers.
I Want My 213
State regulators have asked the FCC for the authority to
order the Bells, which still control and maintain much of
the telephone infrastructure, to program their systems for
?number pooling,? which will break down the prefixes into
blocks of 1,000 numbers. Similar proposals have come
from other numbers-challenged states ? New York,
Florida and Texas. Pacific Bell spokesman John Britton
said the company will abide by the decisions made by
regulators ? but number pooling will require new
programming, and customers will ultimately share the cost.
For now, state regulators can only create new area
codes, either by splitting up communities or by creating
?overlays,? which create new area codes within the same
geographic areas. But residential users in areas with
overlays, naturally, are loath to dial long distance to reach
their new neighbors across the street.
A new area code overlay for the Los Angeles 310
area was halted early this summer when users protested.
State regulators are set to review the area code in
September. Regulators like Billingsley are braced for
similar outrage this fall, when a new overlay is scheduled
to go into effect in San Jose?s 408 area code. Similar
overlays have been approved for San Francisco, Palo
Alto and Oakland and will take effect early next year.
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