Additional NPA Overlay to Toronto ON 416/647 ?? [telecom]

MD did one of the first overlays, and there was a hue & cry not to be believed; you have thought the state's children were being bundled up & sent to the Soylent Green plant.

But now, does anyone even raise their voice? My pet theory is coincident with splits/overlays was the saturation of users with cell phones. Most cell phone calls are dialed with 10D; and the users seem to cope. That coping seems to translate back to wireline, even if the 2500 pad lacks a SPEND key to push.

BTW, Toronto is showing one of the big advantages of overlays. Repeated splits get harder and harder; but an additional overlay is hardly noticeable.

True. But I also suspect another reason is that a great many telephone sets today have speed dialing built in, so for many calls the user only needs to hit one button. Further, many people have answering machines and call waiting, so they don't have to repeat dialing if a call attempt is unsuccessful. (Remember how in the old days one would have to repeatedly dial a number for an important call if the party was either busy or not home?)

If users still had rotary dials, especailly the older kind with the metal dial ring, they wouldn't be pleased. Frequent dialing of ten digits on rotary phones gets tiring real fast.

In some places in the country, it wasn't that long ago that local calls needed only five digits.

I agree. I remember hearing time and again how difficult 10-digit numbers would be on "our children" as if we were collectively rearing the nation's millions of children and these children were incapable of remembering anything longer than seven digits.

Back in the 1990's in Australia the whole numbering plan was rationalised to a standard 2 digit area code + 8 digit local area number (for "Geographic numbers") and at the time the usual "the world will end, old people won't be able to make calls" hoo-haa was aired by the usual suspects.

Sometimes people just have to stop continually complaining and accept that there are actually experts in a particular field that are doing things for everyone's long-term interests.

-- Regards, David.

David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.

Old numbers were preserved or not?

Greetings Marc

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-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " |

On 7/24/10 6:09 PM, David Clayton wrote: .

What I have never understood is why the NPA did not just throw out the plan at the time and go to a European dialing plan, adding a digit to the AC and or another one to the exchange, to me it would have been no more trouble then having to reprogram the switches to handle 11 digits. After it was in place I don't thing new area codes would ever have to be placed into service.

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Steven wro te:

Despite leaving Atlanta in 1992 I have continued to have strong personal ties to the area. There was a some anxiety over the 404/770 split in 1995 and the fact 10-digit dialing would be mandatory. My idea was to have phone numbers go to this format:

Within the metro area people would dial 8 digits while those outside would continue to dial the area as they always have before. Of course such a plan would NEVER have flown, but it's certainly an idea. Isn't this more or less how it works in Europe, phone number length can vary?

John

Yes is how most of Europe has their system set up. One reason that is was possible was after WWII the system had to be built from the bottom up and a lot of the rebuilding was done by the British and the Germans.

Adding on digit in the Exchange would add thousands of numbers to each exchange and the problem with requiring callers to dial 1 xxx-xxx-xxxx. It would have required a major over hall of the system, but callers having to dial 11 digits still required a lot of changes.

-- The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2010 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co.

I know this sounds strange, but just now I realized that I don't know the phone numbers of any of my friends except one, and that's because she says the phone number on her voicemail. If not for hearing that message so often I wouldn't remember it at all.

My phone's number list is automatically backed up once a week where it's accessible via a website, and I download the list from the website every few months.

But, gee, if I didn't have my phone with me or access to a computer I wouldn't know how to reach anybody. I doubt if anybody I know is listed.

Those of us who have more than our share of gray hair have seen too many examples of so-called "experts" screwing things up for the rest of us--and that certainly includes the telecom field. My "DANGER WILL ROBINSON" lights go on the minute someone says "to serve you better", or, "for your protection", or even, "New and improved".

To give one example involving telecom--who was the "expert" who decided that repair service would no longer be reached by dialing 611, and further, no longer reach a skilled craftsman at a test desk but rather go to an untrained clerk hundreds of miles away (after negotiating voice mail jail)?

The number of exchanges assigned to my town is ridiculous. There's no way we could ever fill them up even if every person and all their pets had a land line, cell phone, and fax machine. Indeed, the number of land lines is going down as people abandon them for their cell phones. (How many wealthy parents these days still maintain separate land line phones for their kids? The kids have their own cell phones, so there's no need for "teen" lines, which once was a popular option in well-to-do areas.)

To avoid wasted numbers, I thought they were supposed to be able to assign only portions of exchanges, not the full 10,000 numbers, But apparently not. Plus the fact there's number portability, so someone dumping the baby bell for the cable company will get their number; the cable company doesn't need as many new numbers for it.

There are a wide variety of local and toll telco switches out there, so each type would require its own unique programming. Who would pay for it?

Cell phones would need reprogramming. I suppose that could be downloaded, but again, it must be programmed for all the different phone types out there and someone's gotta pay for it.

Such a change would require a flash cutover. Given how commerce is automated 24/7 now that would be a problem. In the old days of manual- to-dial flash cutovers they'd do as much as possible in advance, but just shut down the exchange from about 11:55 pm to 12:10 am (after widespread publicity) and rush in the cutover. Today such an effort would cause many business problems.

Indeed, going to eight digits would mean a massive effort for the business community to reprogram their internal PBXs and automatic dialing systems. It was a pain when they split an area code some years ago, and more automated systems have come online.

Then of course there's business paperwork and other things, as well as residential records.

In past major cutovers, such as 3L-4N to 2L-5N, many calls failed to go through. You could expect several days of absolute chaos between user errors and telco errors.

Contrast this to area code overlays. The 10 digit can be phased in with a dual period. The new area code is for new numbers, so only a few have it at first. It's far simpler.

Furthermore, I don't think you have a feel for how many systems (alarms, fax machines, pbx, vending machines, etc.) have hard coded 3 digit area codes and 7 digit numbers. Going to 8 digit local numbers or variable length numbers would be unbelievably expensive.

The vast majority of people had one extra digit added to the start of their existing 7 digit number, those few with shorter old numbers had a few more added to get them to the standard 8 digit local number.

-- Regards, David.

David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.

Yes, it's how it works in Europe. It's not how it works here. North American phone systems use what's called "en bloc" signalling, in which a fixed ten digit phone number is sent all at once. European phone systems use "compelled" signalling which can interpret digits one at a time. Back in the 1940s and 1950s when long distance dialing was new, en bloc signalling had huge advantages in North America, where the whole network was under one management, since the switches of the time could back up and try a different route if one route was blocked, while compelled couldn't. These days all the switches are computers which can do any routing trick you want, but the signalling systems are embedded in every switch, and ten digit numbers are embedded in vast numbers of memory phones, PBXes, and who knows what else. The cost of changing is so high that it'll only happen once, when we run out of ten digit numbers and expand everything to 12 digits.

It's worth noting that in Europe the trend has been to fixed length numbers. Every number in France is 9 digits, a one digit region code and an eight digit local number, or a nine digit number starting with

Germany still has numbers of highly variable length, and seems to like it that way, so their compelled signalling isn't going away, either.

R's, John

"Back in the 1940s and 1950s ... the switches of the time could back up and try a different route if one route was blocked ..."

AFAIK, neither the switches available then nor the swiches in use now are able to "back up" when a route is blocked; it's just not a capability that Ma Bell chose, or chooses, to pay for. Once office "A" decides on a route for a call and sends call signalling to the chosen office "B", control passes to office B. The only option for the office B is to complete the call, pass it along to office "C", or fail the call. There is no provision for backing up at any point: office "A" never gets a "try again" message from office B or anyplace else.

The closest thing to a "back up" feature is the capability of SS7-equipped offices to supply local busy tone to the originating subscriber on a failed (busy) attempt, but office A never tries to re-initiate call routing via a different trunk group on any failed call attempt.

Bill Horne Moderator

P.S. I have not included features such as camp-on-busy, since they do _not_ involve a retry of a call attempt which has failed.

That wasn't an expert. That was an accountant, responding to the incentives of rate cap rather than rate of return regulation.

Yes, of course they can. The vast numbers of underused prefixes were assigned before suballocation worked, and they frequently suballocate out of those prefixes now. For example, in Princeton NJ, 609-375-2XXX and 609-375-9XXX are assigned to TCG, 609-375-5XXX through

R's, John

Europe[1] does it differently. Shorter numbers are allowed here, and the exchanges are equipped to handle them. This used to be an advantage, giving us more flexibility[2], and is a disadvantage now, since VoIP equipment needs to employ a time out to find out when the user has finished dialing.

Greetings Marc

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-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " |

And how was a split handled? Half the people in the area got a new area code but were able to keep their "old" seven-digit number? And the other half didn't have a chance at all?

Greetings Marc

--

-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " |

I'm pretty much in the same boat. I rely on scrolling back in caller ID to call people. If you're not one of the last 50 people who've called me, you're out of luck.

I'd program the numbers into speed dial, but I've got 6 phones, and they all program and speed dial differently (except for the one that doesn't do it at all). I'd never remember how to call (or whether a given number had even been programmed, since at least one phone has a

I suppose telco speed dialing would solve that (except for my cell phone), but I'm not going to pay six bucks a month for _that_.

Dave

In the case of a split, such as when southern New Jersey created 856 out of 609, the people in 609 kept the same phone number they always had. The people in the 856 section had the new area code, but the individual phone number didn't change.

In the context of this discussion, note that splits also have an overlap period. That is, during the overlap time one could dial 609 or 856 to reach an 856 number. This gives people time to get used to the new dialing arrangement.