800-Numbers’ Popularity Adds Up to a Supply Problem : Telecom: Lower cost, new services fuel demand. New toll-free code is in the works.

For everyone from mom-and-pop businesses seeking to boost sales outside their area to moms and pops hoping to encourage junior to phone home from college, toll-free 800 numbers have suddenly become the hottest digits around.

800 numbers are everywhere, propelled by a Federal Communications Commission decision in 1993 to open them up to competition by letting users take their 800 numbers with them when they switch long-distance carriers. The cost of maintaining a toll-free line has dropped from more than $1.50 a minute when they were introduced in 1969 to less than 25 cents today.

And now the inevitable is happening: The well of 800 numbers is starting to run dry. The seven digits following the 800 can be arranged into about 7.8 million different usable numbers. An increasingly anxious industry is now only a few months away from being maxed out on toll-free lines. “A majority of our customers have been requesting 800 numbers . . , but demand has been so strong we have to tell them we can’t get any new toll-free numbers,” said Carol Lyons, corporate sales manager for Inland Desert Security and Communications Co., a commercial answering service near Riverside.

“Everybody and his brother wants an 800 number,” said Len Sawicki, senior manager for federal regulatory affairs at MCI Communications Inc., the Washington-based long-distance carrier. “I think we may run out of 800 numbers by the end of the year.”

The run on 800 numbers, fueled by an explosion of pagers, cellular phones and other communications devices, may be aggravated by industry hoarding.

For years enterprising entrepreneurs have snapped up toll-free telephone numbers that spell out corporate names or slogans in hopes of selling such numbers to big business. Now, small and medium-sized long-distance carriers have filed complaints with the FCC, charging that big carriers such as AT&T; and MCI are joining in the hoarding by requesting more toll-free numbers than customers have ordered. MCI requested 75,000 toll-free numbers in the week of June 5 alone, industry sources said.

Kathy M. H. Wallman, chief of the FCC’s common carrier bureau, said the FCC was auditing several carriers for abuses but declined to identify the targets. “We are looking at a number of people that some in the industry have said are warehousing numbers,” she said.

MCI’s Sawicki denied any wrongdoing by his company.

By next April, the local telephone companies hope to have in place new technology that will recognize a new 888 prefix as toll-free, Wallman said. When numbers to go with that new prefix are exhausted, the industry plans to add 877, 866 and so on.

Meanwhile, the FCC has ordered Bellcore, the Livingston, N.J.-based research arm of the seven regional Bell telephone companies, to ration the remaining 800-prefix numbers--500,000 of them are still available--among the 137 carriers authorized to obtain them.

Under the FCC plan, the smallest providers will have just 25 toll-free numbers a month to allocate between now and next April. Even the biggest outfits, such as AT&T; and MCI, will only have a few hundred 800 numbers a month to assign to customers.

The transition, however, is likely to create widespread confusion and deepen the mounting concern about the growing shortage of all kinds of telephone numbers.

As with other area codes, 800-prefix numbers are being depleted by an explosion of fax machines, pagers, cellular phones and other communications devices. Although a record 14 telephone area codes are scheduled to change this year to accommodate the skyrocketing demand, only callers dialing in and out of the affected regions were having to adjust to the area code additions.

By contrast, the crunch facing the 800 area code threatens to have more widespread effect because businesses and consumers throughout the country use such numbers almost daily.

Since they were introduced 26 years ago, 800 numbers have become a key part of the marketing strategies of U.S. business. About $157 billion in goods and services are expected to be sold this year over 800 lines, according to Eugene B. Krodahl, president of National Telemarketing Inc. in New Orleans. Businesses spend about $10 billion a year for toll-free services.

And what was once the province of large corporations has now become a common communications tool for small business and even individuals. After the FCC’s 1993 rule change, the industry started to make a big push to market nationwide toll-free paging services and “personal” 800 numbers that parents can buy so that their children away at college can keep in touch.

“Over the years the cost of 800 service has gone from dollars to pennies a minute,” said Dennis Byrne, director of operations for the United States Telephone Assn., a Washington-based trade group that represents local phone companies. As a result, Byrne said, demand has soared.

The industry was allocating just 30,000 toll-free numbers per month as recently as last year, Byrne said. By last month, the number had jumped to 113,090. But without additional numbers, experts say, such rapid growth could soon slow, and the price of a valuable communications resource could rise.