Chicago Suburbs Will Get a New Area Code

Telephone callers in the Chicago suburbs should be touching some new numbers this weekend, as the suburbs leave the familiar 312 area code for a new number: 708.

“In the Chicago metropolitan area, about 90% of our customers have awareness of the change,” said Pat Montgomery, a spokeswoman for Illinois Bell. “Outside the Chicago area that number is probably less.

“We’re urging the Chicago-area people to make sure their out-of-town customers, relatives and friends know about the change,” Montgomery said Friday.

The phone company is running out of prefixes--the first three digits after the area code. The shortage is not due to population growth but to the increase in new services that require separate telephone numbers, such as Fax machines, said Bell officials.

The 312 area code will remain for the city, and 708 will be applied to surrounding towns. The new area code will extend roughly from city limits north to Wisconsin, west to Hampshire and Oswego, east to Indiana and south to Peotone and Beecher.

About 1.5 million residential lines, 750,000 business lines and 36,000 pay phones will carry the new 708 code.

While Illinois Bell says the change won’t cost customers anything now or in the future, businesses have had to deal with new business cards, stationery and notifying out-of-state associates. The change was announced two years ago, and there appeared to be little last-minute panic among businesses, officials said.

“The department has not received a great deal of alarm or concern from businesses about making the transition,” said Laurence Msall, assistant to the director of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs.

Debra Hale, spokeswoman for the Chicago Assn. of Commerce and Industry, said businesses have called the change a minor annoyance.

There will be a grace period--from Nov. 11 until Feb. 10--when both the old and new systems will work. Calls between the city and its suburbs will go through without use of the area codes and calls from other areas will go through to the suburbs with either the old or new code.