[TELECOM] Re: Louisiana town and its 666 phone exchange

On Friday 28 December 2007, "john at mayson dot us" relayed the following blurb from the Dallas Morning News, under the subject line "Louisiana town changing its 666 phone prefix":

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=20 > "REEVES, La. After decades of living with what Mayor Scott Walker > calls a stigma, residents of this southwest Louisiana village are > getting a new telephone exchange, one without the biblical > connotations attached to their current 666."

Note that the exchange code for Reeves LA, 337-666 is NOT being "changed" to the new 337-749. Other news reports I've seen state that the local telephone company CenturyTel is going to give customers the OPTION of changing their telephone numbers from 337-666 to 337-749. Customers will have a three-month free grace period to change their numbers from the old 337-666 exchange code to the new 337-749 code. After that three-month period, CenturyTel will charge a fee for any such number change. Also, there is NO automatic "guarantee" that their last-four-digits line-number will remain the same when changing from

337-666 to 337-749, although the customer can request that the same line-number's digits be carried over.

Also, all documentation I've seen from Neustar-NANPA, Telcordia-TRA, and other official industry numbering and routing sources do NOT indicate that the 337-666 exchange code is going to be "withdrawn" from Reeves LA; only that CenturyTel had requested a second exchange code 337-749 from Neustar-NANPA back in October 2007, and that Telcordia-TRA's numbering and routing documents (i.e., the LERG) shows the new 337-749 code being officially activated in late December 2007.

So, unless ALL customers, EACH AND EVERY ONE of them, ultimately "leaves" the 337-666 exchange code for being reassigned to the new

337-749 exchange code, CenturyTel will still retain the 337-666 code for Reeves LA, and the rest of the North American telephone industry will also have to recognize the 337-666 code for routing to CenturyTel in Reeves LA. 337-749 is simply becoming a secondary exchange code, although it will most likely "takeover" the bulk of the customers who had previously been assigned 337-666 (which had been 318-666 prior to 1999, when the 318/337 area code split occurred in Louisiana).

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