Re: NPA 909 & overlay trends.

Hell hath no fury like a businessman who doesn't want to buy new > stationary!

It's not the cost of the stationary, it is all the people who have the old number and might not use it until after it had been reassigned. It is also all the equipment which is set to dial the old number (which includes all the individuals who had their equipment set up by someone else - like grandma's speed dials which were set up by the tech-savvy grandchild who can't fly out to grandma to set it up again before the old number stops working).

A Stanford University representative said, both at the 415 -> 650 split hearing and at the 650 split hearing two years later, their catalogs were in unknown thousands of high schools, and were often used many years after they had been mailed to a school.

Also at those hearings, alarm company representatives said that if the phone number was changed, they would have to go to thousands of homes to reprogram the number to be dialed (and then test that the changes were made correctly).

There are real costs to having a phone number changed, well beyond the cost of the stationary.

Mark

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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > There are real costs to having a phone number changed, well beyond the

Historical note:

While the 1960s and 1970s were relatively stable as far as telephone numbers, the 1950s had many changes.

Before Direct Distance Dialing, a town's numbering plan served the needs of the town. So, a tiny town might have three digits while a medium sized city might have five or six digits. Only large cities had today's format of seven digits. In order to implement DDD, every subscriber had to have a unique telephone number.

But in addition to DDD, there were equipment upgrades, such as party line identification and basic growth, that also necessitated new numbers.

In many cases, the subscriber kept part of their number. For instance, someone with 123 would get 555-0123. But in other cases a whole new number was required.

When large cities got dial service, the early method was

3L-4N, such as WAVerly 1234. But a shortage of exchanges required that that be converted to 2L-5N, such as WAverly 7-1234. New York City converted early. Philadelphia converted right after WW II. Note that in Phila's conversion, everyone got a new exchange--old exchanges were not recycled. It was also a flash conversion--everyone's number changed at once and there was no grace period.

Below are a sample of newspaper articles from the 1950s describing the conversions.

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