714/657 Area Codes
 

Beginning tomorrow (Saturday 8/23/08 AD) the 657 area code overlay is in full effect. That means that if you live in the 714 area code and you are dialing someone in the 714 area code, you must now dial the 714 area code in addition to the phone number (whereas previously you only had to dial the seven digit phone number).

Check your speed dials and get used to the added digits.

The low down on the details.

I don't understand why we don't just go to an 8-digit phone number like France does. What's with all the stupid extra area codes when we could just add a zero on the end of all existing numbers and multiply the number of available numbers in every existing area code.

Because anything France does (with the possible exception of wine and bike races) is stupid.

But I think a wiser way to go at this point would be to make every phone number a 10 digit number (making the area code a permanent, non-optional part of every number) and work from there.

Thank God I don't work for the phone company anymore.

Which is essentially what they're doing with these overlays. They're just doing it gradually.

Because 1-800-FLOWERS0 looks stupid.

Plus, there are still around 600 area codes that are unused. That's ~500,000,000 phone numbers, enough for every single individual in this country to get yet another phone and still have a couple hundred unused numbers. Why change the whole system?

Because 10 numbers is more than 8.

I agree. I know a change such as this has to take place gradually.

A habit I got into a long time ago when programming a speed dial number was to always include the area code. That way, when things lime this come up, it ain't no big thing.

You're saying drop area codes all together and JUST use 8 numbers? That would REDUCE the number of available phone numbers. With the area codes currently in use there are ~3.5 billion available phone numbers. 8 digits would be fewer than 100 million phone numbers, not even enough for 1/3 of our population to have their own number (France has a population of only about 65 million).

ETA - oops, decimal error in my post prior to this. The 600 unused area codes is about 5 billion, not 500 million unused numbers. Even less reason to start messing with the number of digits in a phone number. You want to have a pool of available numbers that's vastly larger than what you'll actually use so that you can keep the numbers that are assigned relatively distinct from each other to avoid confusion.

A LOT fewer: eight digits would be 10 million (10,000,000). Dropping all numbers starting with "0" and "1" (you can't [under our current system] have those as the first number of a phone number) and you're down to 8 million.

GD: Not saying drop area codes, just stop adding so many. Go to an 8-digit regular phone number so that people don't have to dial the area code in their own area. Because now, people in Anaheim have to dial 10 digits every time they call. Then they only have to care about the extra digit when dialing outside their area, in which case they're probably not trying to memorize the number anyway.