One Ringy-Dingy Idea

San Fernando Valley consumers got vindication last week when the California Public Utilities Commission concluded that there is “considerable room for growth” in the 818 area code.

Considerable room for growth! Nearly half the 8 million phone number combinations assigned to the area code that serves the Valley aren’t being used. There is no number shortage--and no need to either split the Valley into two area codes or establish an area code “overlay.”

Those were the only two options on the table last year when telephone companies claimed there were not enough numbers left to meet demand. Neither option was appealing.

Dividing the Valley into two area codes meant lost customers and the expense of changing signs, business cards and stationery for small businesses that had spent years promoting their name and phone number. And an overlay, in which only new users are given a new area code, required all users to dial an area code, even for local calls to the same code.

Despite these drawbacks, communities across the country have rolled over and accepted new area codes, often at great hassle and expense, rather than question the way numbers are distributed in the first place.

But not phone customers in the Valley. How, they asked, even with the proliferation of cell phones, fax machines, modems, pagers and extra phone lines, could the Valley’s 1.5 million residents have used up 8 million numbers?

Along with residents of West Los Angeles, Valley residents demanded that their state legislators come up with a better plan. The Legislature passed a bill directing the PUC to do just that.

With the Federal Communications Commission’s permission, the PUC will shrink the blocks of 10,000 numbers it previously distributed to more efficient blocks of 1,000. Under the old rules, carriers such as small pager companies may have needed far fewer than the 10,000 numbers issued but were not required to return unused number or even report their rate of usage.

Of the 3.9 million numbers still available in the 818 area code, a PUC study identified 1.8 million being held by hard-wired phone companies and 834,000 by wireless companies.

Such number conservation measures won’t work, the skeptics said a year ago. They were wrong. It’s no longer good enough for phone companies to say, a la Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine, “We don’t care. We don’t have to.” It was the phone companies, not the callers, that had the wrong numbers.