Local 10-digit dialing? [Telecom]

Every place with overlays, except for NYC where it's 11 digit local dialing.

Wikipedia has a list:

It's also 11D (1+10D) dialing in the overlay areas in Illinois (224/847,

When asking a question of "how much" regarding telephones, it is important to qualify it with a measure. That is, how many _towns_, how much land area, or probably the best metric, how many telephone lines or population.

Further, per this question, some places may still have seven digit dialing, but the area codes may have been split into such tiny slivers that subscribers end up dialing ten digits anyway for most calls.

I use MagicJack and EVERYTHING is 10 digit dialing with that.

What area does NOT require 10 digits?

Also, very few area codes now definitively tell you Where the phone is because so many numbers have been ported to cell phones.

Most of Wise County in Texas under Embarq only requires 7 digit dialing to any other Wise County Embarq phone. The exception is the Embar areas in a different AC.

Places without overlays, most of the geographic territory in the country. Here in NY, for example, only NYC has 1+10 local dialing. In our upstate paradise we still have the dialing plan that God intended, 7D within the area code, 1+10D elsewhere, with no dial plan nonsense for local/toll, inter/intra-lata, etc. (I can dial 7D calls that are local, intralata toll, and interlata toll.)

It's true, people can move across the country and take their mobile numbers with them, and VoIP users can have numbers anywhere they want (I have one in a different country) but for the most part, the people and the area codes still match.

R's, John

OK, what am I missing? If the leading 1 digit is always 1, why is it required? Seems absurd. Of course, I also think it's absurd when I dial a 1 for a non-toll call and get a message telling me to dial again without the 1. If they can figure out that isn't a toll call, why not just connect it? Sheesh!

Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va.

Because.

Yeah. It was required initially due to the transition from 7D to 1+10. I haven't checked lately to see if calls without 1+ work.

R's, John

That's how it is in Massachusetts. 1 is required for toll calls, optional and ignored for non-toll calls. Either way, 10 digits of phone number are required.

I'm pretty sure it goes back to SxS exchanges where the initial 1 connected you to the toll switch. Places with mostly SxS (rural, non-bell) tended to have 1+, places with mostly panel (urban, Bell) which could decode the leading digits of the number, didn't.

R's, John

I know. What I said "that's how it is in Massachusetts", I was referring to what John L said, not what Bill Ranck said. We do what John L would like -- you don't get a message telling you not to dial 1.

According to what I recall from the Bell System history (not in front of me), CO exchanges (presumably panel) were updated in the 1950s to do toll restriction from PBXs at the CO level. This way PBX users could have multiple classes, some local only, some toll (and some PBX only). The PBX user would dial 9 and the CO would not route the call if toll. It had nothing to do with 1+, 7D message unit calls were blocked too. (I worked in a hospital PBX that used this.)

Geez, we forget how much trouble businesses went to blocking toll calls in PBXs, even blocking local calls. In the old days it was common for a only a few phones to have dial 9 outside local access.

I believe the 1+ barrier was for two purposes: 1) to alert the caller they were making a toll call, and 2) to route the call to a long distance abled switch. Apparently SxS was not flexible enough (within economic reason*) to handle DDD. You dialed 1 and the local switch put you to something that would store the long distance 10 digit number. There were various schemes for this. In later years it was an add-on electronic register to a SxS switch. In some cases it was a tandem switch.

There were plenty of places that did NOT use a 1 toll barrier, but accepted the ten digits.

I think with panel it went either way; sometimes 1 switched right to a tandem, sometimes the register held some digits, dumped them, then took some more.

Some early SxS DDD used 11n as the toll barrier. SxS used 11n for a variety of things instead of n11 that panel used.

Some SxS locations had strange dialing prefixes for toll calls, and different prefixes for calls to different locations.

I believe most of California is still 7-digit dialing for intra-LATA, but overlay is slowly catching on.

When the area code system was first devised the grand idea was that the "0/1" structure as the second digit of the area code would identify a long-distance call without further user action. This was part of the concept of Bell Labs to make the phone so simple that a five-year-old child could intuitively use it. BTW, the phone company used to come in to my school in about the third grade and do a "show and tell" about how the telephone worked - and telling us that if we ever had any kind of problem, just "dial zero" and the nice lady (operators were always ladies in those days) would always help.

By 1959 Bell recognized that the area code plan would require expansion. "AT&T Notes on the Network" from 1968 was planning for the numbering space expansion, by noting that when the "N 0/1 X" codes were exhausted they would start assigning NN0 codes, and when those ran out they would go to the NXX format. There is a chart in "Notes" that showed the sequence in which the NN0 codes would be assigned.

By the late 1960s they started training the North American populace to dial "1+" in preparation for the inevitable change. There was a period, probably in the late '60s or early '70s where you could just dial ten digits without the "1+" and the call would still go through. This was probably a function of the type of serving central office.

Another observation - you have to have some method of differentiating between a self-dialed LD call, operator-assisted call, or international call. Of course we use 1+, 0+, and 011+ respectively. Many (but not all) other countries use 0+ for a self-dialed national call and 00+ for international access. There has been recent discussion about the North American dial plan switching from 011 to 00 for international access. I am heartily against such a proposal - I can't imagine trying to train 400-500 million people who use the NANP to dial something different after all these years.

At American Airlines we used the "1+" as a discriminator in our dial plan to prevent LD calls via the PSTN - we had our own private network. When they made the "1+" mean "ten digits follows" instead of "toll call" we had to adopt different methods of controlling toll calls.

Regards.

Charles G. Gray

Senior Lecturer, Telecommunications

Oklahoma State University - Tulsa

(918) 594-8433

It really annoys me that we have to dial an extra 10 digits for oper- handled calls or pay $25 per call. Thank you Judge Greene. I've said it before and I'll say it again: when one is in an emergency situation--as I've been--one doesn't think about special pre-paid calling cards or dialing codes--one wants to make a call as quickly and simply as possible. (In other words, when I got sick while travelling, I wasn't in a position to run out and buy pre-paid calling cards or remember the special 10 digit access number which I rarely use. Likewise when my mother was taken to the emergency room.)

The march of technology was supposed to make things simpler, not more complex.

I wonder what percentage of toll calls, both short and long haul, are still person-to-person. It's still listed as a service--with a steep charge--in the phone directory. One old advantage was that charging wasn't supposed to start until the desired person answered, so if you're waiting on hold for a few minutes while the desired party is paged, you're not supposed to pay for that time. I don't know if that's still true.

Likewise I wonder what percentage are "time and charges", where the operator calls you back and reports on the cost of the call. This used to be very common for business calls.

At one time there was "3 minute notification". I don't know if that's still offered.