By Bruce Newman, San Jose Mercury News
03..07.11
There are 8 million phone numbers in the naked city. And no matter who you were calling in San Jose -- or large swaths of the South Bay -- for the past half century, you've had to dial this: area code 408.
But with the explosive proliferation of cell phones, wireless IP addresses and 4G-enabled baby pacifiers, the area code that has served San Jose since neighbors could listen in on each other's party line calls is officially "exhausted."
That conclusion -- arrived at by the Orwellian-sounding North American Numbering Plan Administration, or NANPA, in December -- means some South Bay phone customers will start being assigned area code 669 by the end of next year.
Deciding who gets to hang onto their 408, and who becomes a 669, is the job of the California Public Utilities Commission, which will convene hearings March 16-18 in San Jose, Los Gatos and Morgan Hill to explain the switch.
The current area code will either be split in two -- a Balkanization of the chattering classes, with 408 Hatfields on one side and 669 McCoys suspiciously screening their calls on the other -- or the PUC will impose an "overlay." That has become a popular method of allowing phone customers to keep their current area code, while assigning 669 to people signing up for new service. Companies providing phone service have recommended an overlay. The upshot: Soon, we'll all be dialing 10-digit numbers to make a local call in Silicon Valley.
"It seems like every man, woman and baby has a cell phone now," says John Manning, senior director of NANPA, an obscure agency in Virginia that monitors the depletion of dialing prefixes the way tree-huggers track the ozone layer. Manning acknowledges that people could easily get confused by the fact that, "theoretically, 408 has 8 million telephone numbers. But there aren't 8 million people living in 408."
So with just more than a million residents of San Jose, what happened to the nearly 7 million missing phone numbers?
"There's only so many prefixes, and once those are assigned, theoretically, the area code is in exhaust," says Cherrie Conner, supervisor in the communications division of the PUC, which will moderate the March 16 meeting at San Jose's City Hall.
Phone companies are assigned three-digit prefixes a thousand at a time, so when a large corporate customer wants all its phone numbers to have the same signature -- to reach Cisco's San Jose campus, for instance, you dial 526 -- it gobbles up prefixes in bulk. But often hundreds of unused numbers are orphaned.
It isn't as if 408 was carved out during Old Testament times. The entire Bay Area once shared what is now San Francisco's tony 415 area code. For people in San Jose before that change was made in 1959, 408 always seemed like 415's slightly less cool little brother.
Ma Bell's original area codes are easy to spot by their middle digits, which are 0 or 1, conferring a measure of hipness on the East Bay when it converted to 510 in 1991. For 650, 831 and 925, undoubtedly those area codes have many fine qualities that are known to the people who live there.every man, woman and baby has a cell phone now," says John Manning, senior director of NANPA, an obscure agency in Virginia that monitors the depletion of dialing prefixes the way tree-huggers track the ozone layer. Manning acknowledges that people could easily get confused by the fact that, "theoretically, 408 has 8 million telephone numbers. But there aren't 8 million people living in 408."
The process of assigning area codes remains cloaked in mystery. Conner has no idea how this area was assigned 669. "They probably just draw it out of a hat," she says. Some area codes are off limits; 666 is not being used anywhere, unless you are direct-dialing Satan. South Bay residents might have preferred 369 for its easy rhyming mnemonic:
"You're going to get a lot of people who think it's cool to get a 669 number just because it has 69 in it," says Marina Renneke. She is not one of those people, having clung tight to her 408 area code since moving to Phoenix five years ago."3, 6, 9, the goose drank wine ..." from "The Clapping Song." Unfortunately, Solano County got there first.
"It's funny how people identify with area codes," she says. "I was born and raised in the Bay Area, and 408 was always my area code, so when I moved here I felt like it sort of distinguished me. Like, 'Hey, I'm a 408'er.' "
When the PUC attempted to impose a split plan in San Diego a few years ago, people in the county's urban areas rose up in fury and forced the agency to change to an overlay plan. "People's phone numbers are very personal," says Christopher Chow, public information officer for the PUC. "They identify very strongly with it."
Conner says there is one way to avoid adding new area codes. If there were a nuclear war or some other cataclysmic event that forced the phone companies to start from scratch, numbers could be assigned to each user consecutively, so that every one is used. Then everybody in San Jose could remain a 408'er.
"But that's changing your phone number," Conner says. "And nobody's going to go for that."
Keep the 408. Period.
ReplyDelete