Numbers Game

For phone users, the digital age has largely come to mean dialing more digits.

First came a rash of new area codes, forcing more people to dial 11 digits to call even short distances. Now consumers will need to dial new, additional numbers if they want to use a long-distance carrier other than the one assigned to their phone. Many callers also use the dial-around method at pay phones.

Beginning this month, the special carrier codes customers use to reach a specific long-distance company grew from the old 10-XXX to 10-1-XXXX.

Add those seven digits to the 1 and the long-distance number that follows the code, and the grand total comes to 18.

As with area codes, the change was bound to come. Faced with a shrinking stock of numbers and a growing list of phone carriers--each needing a three-digit code--the nation’s number administrators converted each company’s code to four digits.

That move increases the available pool of numbers to about 10,000, up from about 1,000.

Many of the best-known companies switched to four digits by adding a 0 in front of their old code. Thus, MCI’s code--formerly 222--is now 0222. The company is advertising the access number as 10-10-222 to make it easier to remember.

However, consumers will increasingly see access codes that do not start with 10-10.