In many places in the U.S. the demand for telephone exchanges is very high for a variety reasons. This has result in area code splits and overlays. NJ started off with one area code and now has nine.
But some states still only have one area code. I understand some states are not growing very fast in population, indeed, some rural towns are losing population. This includes: Alaska, Idaho, Montanna, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. (Not counting some other single-code states).
Given the rural/low growth aspect of places in some of these states, I was wondering if telephone service may still have some old fashioned features to it. For example, would such areas have:
1) Traditional party line service, since it's not worth the cost to upgrade lines out to people's farms?2) Five digit dialing in some areas not well populated or served by community dial offices?
I believe everything is ESS nowadays, but that pays for itself by eliminating the need for technicians to visit remote unattended switches. Probably some community dial offices have been converted to concentrators or feeders to a larger CO elsewhere.
Any other comments about _today's_ rural telephone service would be appreciated.
[public replies please][TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I also understand almost everything these days is ESS ... and the days of 'community dial' (or less than seven digit dialing) has become as rare as the California Condor. Kansas is a relatively rural area; at one time we had just two area codes, 316 for the southern half of the state and 913 for the northern part. Kansas City metro area was area 816 but one could dial seven digits for either side of the state line. Then they chose to confine
913 to the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City, and other north places went to 785. A couple years ago, 316 was given to Wichita only and a few other nearby suburbs, and the rest of us in the more rural area of southeast Kansas were switched to 620. Around here, there are still party lines (not in Independence itself, but in 'rural' such as Tyro, Kansas, Caney, Jefferson, Liberty. The way they handle the billing and routing is all those towns have different prefixes but the first digit in the suffix is different in each case. Everyone in Tyro for example is 289-4xxx everyone in Caney is 289-2xxx. The only places 'big enough' to have more than one prefix are Coffeyville (251 and 252), and Independence (331 mainly, but a few cell phones in 330 and the City Offices on 332 along with Cessna Aircraft and one other company). There are some 'area-wide' prefixes used by TerraWorld and Prairie Stream Communications (712, 713, 714) but no one other than me has ever heard of those or use them except in very rare cases. TerraWorld as an ISP uses 714-0005 as its dialup for 56-K in several small towns around here; they use 712-0005 as their 56-K dialup for Coffeyville, Caney and Tyro. PAT]