Garrett Wollman had written:
And it is a practice not limited to broadcasting stations. A local example in Oakland is a real estate agency in my area whose main office line is 531-xxxx. In its corporate ads for real estate listings, the agents for the individual listings are given a phone number of 531-xxxx, ext. nnn. But in ads for the individual agents (such as their open house of the week), they usually give their phone numbers as 485-7nnn. Interestingly, 485 isn't a Pac Bell/SBC office. This, too, seems increasingly common judging by the prefixes I have seen in our neighborhood weekly whose primary means of support is real-estate ads.
Of course, there is nothing these days to prevent routing an ILEC number to a CLEC switch, but it is perhaps notable that the established ILEC number is retained as a central point of contact even as all the internal DID extensions are provided by the CLEC. For the real-estate office example above, it would seem that 485-7000 would be a perfectly serviceable main reception number, yet they've kept the
531-xxxx number.Mark Roberts | "I know you know the situation is past critical." Oakland, Cal.| -- FEMA staff member Marty Bahamonde, in New Orleans NO HTML MAIL | "Anything specific I need to do or tweak?" | -- FEMA director Michael Brown replies to that e-mail Permission to archive this article in any form is hereby explicitly denied.