Rossford, Ohio (near Toledo) has a ‘666’ exchange.
When I was growing up in the Baltimore suburbs, you did that with 844-1212. It’s the same where I live now in Virginia. But that may be due to the fact that they’re both under C&P Telephone. Oh, sorry, I mean Bell Atlantic. Wait. Verizon.
Yup. My telephone number, when I lived in Rossford, was 666-8609.
One of the exchanges around us when I was a kid was “Mohawk 6” (666).
(Going back further in time, we had a 4 digit number. Now it’s 10 and we’re eating thru those quickly.)
Boulder County, Colorado has a 666 exchange.
Up here in Cockeysville, Maryland 666 is a valid exchange, my home phone number started with this. I think close to 10,000 other phones probably had it as well. Between Cockeysville and the 666 we amused phone order companies to no end.
The last three numbers of my cell phone are “666”. When I asked for a number change a few years back I was shown a list of numbers to choose from. The phone rep pointed out the number with the trip sixes and said, “well, obviously you wouldn’t want that one”. Boy, was she wrong.
Smash his snow plow with Linda Ronstadt?
Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood uses (312) 666-#### for numbers.
A year or so ago, there was an article in the Toronto Star about the reminiscinces of one of the last farmers in Toronto itself… he had grown up in the Mimico area, along Lake Ontario just west of Humber Bay and what we now call “downtown” Toronto in the 1920s. His family’s phone number was “4”.
Just “4”.
I wonder who had the first three phones.
The last three numbers of my landline are “666”. I’m not Christian and don’t subscribe to silly superstitions about 666, so I couldn’t care less. I don’t particularly want to talk to anyone who would care about that.
If you call me sometime it might lead to the second coming. And I don’t mean phone sex.
I’d love to get the number 666-1313. However, I’m not aware of a 666 exchange in my area code.
What’s interesting is that most new Area codes aren’t needed, it’s just the Telephone Company being lazy. An Area code can handle around 9 million telephone numbers. While it is true than many dudes might have two home lines, a cell phone, a work number and even a pager- not every living person even has *one * number (few young children have any, many families all have one number, and most businesses don’t have an individual number for every employee). So, what the telephone company was telling you dudes in the Toronto area - with a “Greater Metro area pop” of some 5 million- that there was a need for 40 million numbers, 8 for every single living soul, even newborn infants! :dubious: Which, frankly, is bullshit. What happened is that your Telephone company was greedy AND lazy. Telephone companies “sell or allocate” numbers to non-landline companies- and it’s easier for Ma Bell to just allocate “nodamnwhere Cellular” whole prefixes at a time. But it’s NOT nessesary. In reality the Toronto area could likely have gotten by with a single Area code, two at the max. In other words, this last “overlay” was unessesary, expensive and likely very profitable to the telephone company. (When there’s more area codes, there’s a great chance dudes will call the wrng number or even call the right number and talk too long not realizing it’s actaully a real long distance call!).
Here in the San Jose area, the telephone company had informed everyone that there was also going to be an “overlay”. Some dude on the Grand Jury who could do basic math had the Grand Jury ask the telephone company to justify why they needed 18 million numbers for an area with about 1 million dudes*. The phone company immediately dropped all plans for the overlay without explanation, and there has been no call for an overlay for some 6 years now. *
So, dudes. Next time the Phone company announces a “split” or "overlay’ of your area codes- get your local Politicos to get the Phone company to justify the real need.
666 wasn’t used here in London at one time, but it’s now a Croydon code. 123 and 234 etc weren’t used either at one time to discourage children playing with the phone.
Are you sure that Croydon’s 666 code is really all that new? And I’m pretty sure that you’re reciting an urban myth about consecutive digits…for example, 0161 234 xxxx (i.e. 234 xxxx from local phones) is the format for Manchester City Council numbers, and 01234 is the STD for Bedford.
I was looking over an pretty old directory we had lying about the exchange and noted they were missing from the lists of London codes
And Maryland is also one of the places you need to dial all 10 numbers. We have 4 area codes here, two overlaid in two sections (240 and 301 in the west and southwest portion and 410 and 443 in the central and eastern parts), and even if you’re calling across the street, you need to dial the whole number. It’s been that way for about 15 years, IIRC.
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (county seat of Kootenai County) has a 666 exchange.
There was a lot of discussion on the TELNUM-L mailing list a while back about this, DrDeth. I’ll give my understanding of this (I could be wrong).
The root of the problem with “running out of phone numbers” is that it’s the exchanges that are limited, more than the individual numbers.
The phone system was set up so that each phone number was assigned to a location (“rate centre”) for billing purposes. These rate centres would then be used to figure out what to bill customers calling from one number to another: are they calling long-distance, and if so across what distance?
Each exchange was assigned to a rate centre. Numbers in the same exchange were by definition local to one another. Exchanges could be local or long-distance from each other.
Often the exchanges in different rate centres were implemented in physically-separate pieces of phone-switch hardware. Exchanges in the same rate centre could be implemented in the same switch hardware… or not, depending on how big the physical territiry covered by the rate centre was.
The exchange, and its area code, was used to identify the rate centre by a database lookup when a call was made. The billing system therefore had only to look at the area code and exchange to identify the rate centre.
Each exchange XXX had, by definition, 10,000 individual telephone line numbers (AAA-XXX-0000 through AAA-XXX-9999). If you had a locality that needed 10,005 actual lines, there was no choice but to assign it two exchanges, and thus allocate 20,000 potential numbers to it… even if there was no way that the locality would need all 20,000 numbers for many years, and neighbouring exchanges in different rate centres were crying for numbers.
The same problem held for area codes, on a larger scale. If all the possible exchanges in an area code were allocated, and more exchanges were needed, there would be no choice but to add another area code, even if there were hundreds of thousands or millions of unallocated line numbers in the existing exchanges.
There were two ways around this problem of running out of exchanges: thousands-block pooling, and rate-centre consolidation.[ul][li]Thousands-block pooling allowed an exchange to support several different rate centres. Locality A with only 2000 line numbers in use (out of the 10,000 in its exchange), and very slow growth, could ‘give’ 5000, say, of its line numbers to fast-growing nearby locality B in a different rate centre. [/li]
The same exchange would then have lines in two different rate centres. This required that the billing database system be reprogrammed to distinguish more digits in the phone number, since just looking at the area code and exchange was no longer enough to determine the rate centre of the phone number.
It was easiest to distinguish the rate centres in the exchange by the ‘thousands’ digit in the number: AAA-XXX-NNNN. The billing system would then look at AAA-XXX-NNNN rather than just AAA-XXX-NNNN when identifying rate centres. This meant that the number were handed out in blocks of 1000 rather than 10,000.
[li]In rate-centre consolidation, neighbouring exchanges in different rate centres were redefined to be in the same rate centre. This allowed extra line numbers in one of the formerly-separate exchanges to be used in other exchanges that needed them. (Actually, the exchange number giving the extra lines would be implimented in the physical hardware of the phone switches in the other localities in the rate centre.) [/li]
From the viewpoint of the caller, all the consolidated exchanges became local to one another, and any long-distance charges between then ceased. No changes to the mechanics of the billing system were needed.[/ul]Rate-centre consolidation makes sense in a metropolitan area where many small rate centres are in localities physically close together. Exchange numbers can be multiply-implemented in switch hardware across the newly-consolidated area, and unused line numbers can be supplied to switches that need them. The cost of carrying the calls between the switches, formerly charged as long-distance between the old rate centres, is absorbed by an increase in the base monthly tariff charged to customers.
If the consolidated rate centres are far apart, the cost of physically calling between them might not be recoverable without a very great increase in base tariffs. Since the exchanges that have unused line numbers are implemented in the different phone switches across the consolidated area, there is no longer a way to identify the different localities to charge for long-distance calling.
So a phone company faced with localities needing numbers, and other localities having usable numbers ‘trapped’ in different rate centres, has only a few choices:[ul][li]Consolidate rate centres, free up numbers, and lose potential long-distance revenue.[]Use thousands-block pooling to distinguish rate centres within the exchange and free up numbers, but at the cost of modifying the billing system, or…[]Implement another area code and create more numbers.[/ul]Now, adding an area code brings its own issues. [/li]
If you split the existing area code to change half the exchanges/line numbers in its territory to the new code, the customers concerned have to change their phone numbers, autodialers, stationery, etc. This is a huge pain in the butt, and there’s no guarantee that it won’t happen again. (I seem to recall that some areas in Florida went through this three times in ten years!)
If you overlay the area code, there is a one-time cost to set up the system to require the area code to be dialed at all times; to educate the customers to dial ten digits at all times; and for all of the customers to update their autodialers, stationery, etc to include the area code.
With an overlay, the digits of the customers’ existing numbers do not change, and people calling from outside tha rea code or calling long-distance do not notice any changes. If more numbers or exchanges are needed, new area codes can be added with absolutely no disruption to existing customers.
On rereading your post, DrDeth, I realise that I haven’t mentioned alternative carriers. They are indeed a big part of the reason exchange usage, and therefore new area code issuance, spiked so much in the late nineties. Each phone company in a locality required a separate exchange, again because the billing system could only use the area code and exchange to distinguish what carrier was to be billed. It was the same technical problem as I described before, squared.
The phone companies may be greedy (especially considering the dropping cost of long-distance communication now that the world is covered in optical fibres using internet protocol–maybe we could declare all of Southern Ontario to be local to itself, intermix all the area codes, and free up all those phone numbers trapped in little places like Sutton and Wiarton and Omemee), but technically-lazy they are not.