On Sat, 24 Jan 2015, Ed Vance wrote to Daryl Stout:

 EV> I just got a notice in the latest Telephone bill that another Area
 EV> Code will be added to this area and except for 911 and 411 and a
 EV> few other 3 numbered phone numbers everyone will have to dial ten
 EV> digits even to talk to the neighbor who has a phone number with the
 EV> same Area Code after some date in February 2015.

we've been doing that for a few years now...

 EV> When I read about the proposal to have another Area Code for this
 EV> area I wrote the Board studying the proposal and suggested to them
 EV> to have ALL of the Cell Phone Companies in my Area Code be given
 EV> the new Area Code, then there would be pleanty of free numbers for
 EV> them to give new Businesses and Residential Customers who use Wired
 EV> Telephones. 

that's not really the problem... it is that the exchanges are having to be
duplicated in more areas because they are running out of numbers... the
areacodes keep the exchanges separated... i've always use ten digits on
cell phones... especially since they automatically add the leading 1 if
necessary for a LD call...

 EV> And the only people in this Area Code who wanted to call someone
 EV> who was on a Cell Phone would have to dial Ten Digits only for
 EV> those phone numbers, and everyone with Wired Telephones could still
 EV> dial Seven numbers to call Telephone Exchanges in the Local Dialing
 EV> Area, and only have to dial "Our" Area Code for calls to Towns
 EV> quite a distance from our area.

the problem here is that, like in my area, there are identical numbers in
ajoining areacodes... consider this... you dial just seven digits and
you're near the areacode boundry... which one of those two duplicated
numbers are you trying to reach? i used to get phone calls all the time
from folks trying to set up appointments for work on their cars... if they
had used all ten digits, they would not have been calling the wrong number
and they would not have been causing me to have more expensive phone
bills... i finally set my voice mail recording to say something like
"if you are calling about work on your car, hang up and use the proper
areacode when you dial the number otherwise, leave me a message and i'll
get back to you as soon as possible!" ;)

 EV> I suppose they didn't listen to me.

 EV> I tried.

unfortunately, it couldn't work like that... it won't be long before we
start running out of areacodes, too... country codes won't really help
since the ACs are duplicated within a country... they will have to
eventually come up with something else like they did back in the day...
only this time, perhaps they should also consider having a planetary prefix
as well so we don't have to deal with this again when we do finally start
populating other ""rocks"" in space ;) ;) ;) 

)\/(ark