I work in ght 206 area code. When I make calls they’re often to 425 or 253. When I lived in L.A. (310) and wanted to call 213 or 714 or 909 or whatever, I dialed a one first. Up here, sometimes if you dial one before the area code you get a recording saying, ‘I’m sorry. You do not need to dial a one.’ On other numbers in the 425 or 253 area codes I’ll not dial a one and I get a recording that says, ‘I’m sorry. You first need to dial a one.’
First: Why the non-standard scheme? Wouldn’t it make sense to dial a one whenever you’re placing a call outside of your area code?
Second: Is there a ‘trick’ to knowing when to dial a one and when not to when calling another area code from Seattle?
Sounds like Seattle’s a ‘toll-alerting’ area, like Toronto is, and LA isn’t (according to your description).
There are two traditional ways to dial one (or zero) before a phone number in North America.
In areas with toll alerting, you dial a 1 or 0 before any long-distance call, whether it’s in the same area code or not. You dial local calls without the 1 or 0, even if they’re in another area code.
This is how traditional landlines in Toronto work: you must dial the 1 or 0 before a long-distance call. This prevents you from inadvertently dialling what you think is a local call, without the 1 or 0, and getting charged long-distance fees for it.
Other areas use the 1 (or 0) to mean “area code follows”, whether it’s a local call or not. In these areas, you dial a 1 before any area code, even on a local call. Local calls do not take a one if they’re dialled as seven digits without the area code. (Not all areas allow seven-digit dialling.)
Where toll-alerting gets annoying is when it is mandatory. These areas forbid dialling 1 or 0 before a local call, which strikes me as unnecessary. If you dial 1, it should mean that you’re willing to pay long-distance, and it the call turns out to be local, bonus! It’s cheaper!
Edit: the trick is to know which calls are local in a toll-alerting area. This is where those phone-book lists of who can call who locally came in handy. But with competing phone companies, discount plans, cell-hones, cheap long-distance rates, and so on, these days, toll alerting is much less valuable than it once was.
But there’s no way to tell what’s local from the phone number. You just have to learn from experience. And yes, it sucks.
Back when I was a boy everything west of the Cascades was 206. There was no way to tell when you’d be going long distance until you got the phone error explaining that you were a dumbass.
I think it is broken up a bit by county. I can call all of the 206 codes in King freely, but if I ring a 425 less than a mile away, it’s long distance. I can dial many in-county 425 or 253 codes however without the 1.
After some googling, I’m stumped however, I can’t find anything that has a zone-map or boundaries for long distance.
Hm. Unfortunately I’m quite unable to provide any assistance with this bit of local trivia, since now that I think of it, I have never used a landline phone in Seattle. :o
At least, no landline phone that wasn’t behind some sort of exchange that required special dialing just to get an outside line in the first place.
It goes by ‘rate centre’. Each exchange code is associated with a rate centre, which is the location used for determining charges. Calls are made between two rate centres, and the “distance” between the rate centres (as calculated from each rate centre’s ‘V&H coordinate’, the telephone equivalent of longitude and latitude) determines what the cost of the call will be. But that cost varies according to what phone company you use, the time of day, what calling plan you’re on, whether you have flat-rate calling, whether you’ve paid extra for extended local calling, etc, etc, etc.
The billing system using rate centres and V&H coordinates was devised in the days of the Bell monopoly, but it’s had all these layers of complexity added on to support competing phone companies, local number portability, area-code overlays, mobile phones, and Og knows what else. I’m not sure it would be possible to make one map showing all local areas. Your best bet would be to contact your phone company.
there is no real rhyme or reason here, I can remember calling Woodenville from Southcenter for a quarter, then when I got to Bellevue (half way there if not more) it was now a long distance call…
Cell phones are nice enough to handle that aspect for you.
That’s starting to happen, at least in my area. I am aware of three systems around here: AT&T (traditional phone lines), Charter Cable (telephone thru cable TV lines), and cellular (although that encompases at least 3 carriers and they might have their own rules).
The trend seems to be towards permitting a 1+(area code)+7 digits as an option, even tho the 7 digits would be sufficient. I find myself programming my celphone to always send the 1+(area code) even for local numbers, because if I don’t, I sometimes hit other cell towers that insist on it. Better to include the extra digits and not have to dial twice.
And since 10 digit dialing will be introduced here next year as an option for all carriers, then made mandatory a year or so later as planned, we’d better get used to it.
I think the whole idea is that dialing one before the call means you recognize that you will have to pay long distance charges, while not dialing one means you didn’t authorize it. In my mind, dialing one before the area code would give them permission to charge it as a long distance call even though it wasn’t.
Anyways, following that logic, it makes no sense why, if you dial the number “incorrectly”, that the automated message can’t give the option to automatically dial the “correct” number for you. Just make sure it takes a little bit of time, so that it is still more convenient to dial the number correctly and not tie up the automated message lines.
While that may be an added benefit, the original reason for prefixing a 1 was to tell the switching equipment to expect 10 digits next. Without the 1, it would expect 7, and interpret each digit differently.
Before the required “dial 1 first”, area codes were distinguished by their middle digit, which was 0 or 1 only (303, 213, 415, 800, etc.). Since up to that time, exchange names (letters) were used for the first 2 digits of phone numbers, and since the letters A…Z occupied the numbers 2…9, but not 1 or 0, that meant if the second digit dialed was a 0 or 1, the switching equipment could be sure that the customer indended to dial an area code and a 10-digit number. But if the second digit received was 2…9 (=A…Z), it knew that the customer was dialing a local, 7-digit number. Pretty neat scheme and a simple solution, but made some area codes impossible to assign, shortening the list of available numbers. When they began running out of numbers, something had to give.
Since the concept was that long distance calls would be less common than local ones – especially since the cost was much greater at that time – the burden of more complicated dialing would be minimal for a typical user.
And “1” was chosen for the simple reason that no numbers up to that time began with a 1 (or zero). If you dialed a one, nothing happened (it wouldn’t even break the dial tone), so with a small change in equipment programming to recognize the one as a valid first digit, the scheme was halfway there.
I couldn’t agree with you more. If the computer says, “You must first dial a one,” then it obviously doesn’t need for the user to do it, but it could do that itself with next-to-zero overhead. It got to be the simpliest programming change ever invented and would be a big customer convenience. Why it rarely works that way after 40 years is a mystery to me.
I used to get the reverse message sometimes, “You do not need to dial a one,” which is even sillier. While it might be good to know that for next time, it’s ridiculous to force the customer to re-dial when the computer could just drop the unneeded digit.
Since there is no way a customer can know in advance whether a 1 was required or prohibited when dialing a number just by looking at the digits, this is customer service at its most diabolical. If someone leaves a callback number on my answering machine, how can I tell which kind it is unless I have a list of them for my location? And this was made worse in some exchanges where, if you dialed wrong, instead of advising you of the error, all you heard was the ringing noise, but it never actually rang the other end! People sometimes appeared to not be home when they really were.
Last night (or this morning, if you will) after SNL Almost Live came on. As most of you probably know, Almost Live is a comedy show produced in Seattle. It started out with a skit featuring a phone representative explaining the (then-) new area codes. The gag was, ‘If you didn’t have to dial one before, you don’t have to dial one now.’ And the characters attending his lecture kept asking variations of ‘So… Wait. We have to dial one now?’
