Seven Is Enough
The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday rejected plans to require the whole country to dial 10 digits for every call, but that won’t stop phone companies from lobbying for such a system. The truth is, the numbers problem won’t ease until the agency overhauls antiquated rules that artificially depress the nation’s supply of phone numbers.
A chief purpose of technology should be to make life easier and more productive. With that in mind, the Bell system limited phone numbers to seven digits following extensive psychological tests in the 1950s that showed that a seven-digit number is the maximum most people can commit to memory easily.
In the last year, phone companies have insisted to state and federal regulators that 10-digit dialing may be unavoidable because ever-multiplying numbers for computers, pagers, cell phones and fax machines have left the nation with a near-catastrophic lack of phone numbers. Recent studies, however, show that there is no numbers crisis. Just last week, for instance, the California Public Utilities Commission released a study showing that only about half of nearly 32 million phone numbers were in customer use in four crowded area codes in Southern California and the Bay Area.
The main reason for all the unused numbers is that numbers are granted to individual phone companies in blocks of 10,000, needed or not. This year California rightly began requiring that new phone numbers be handed out in blocks of 1,000 instead. The FCC is moving to a similar requirement nationwide and will make companies prove they are using existing telephone numbers before they are given new ones. The agency shouldn’t stop there. It should also encourage issuance of new area codes specifically for cell phones and other mobile devices. The alternative could be the addition of six new area codes in the Los Angeles region alone--a highly disruptive decision that phone companies have been pressuring the FCC to make.
Next, the agency should tackle what a recent report commissioned by large corporate telephone users called “the root of the problem”: limiting specific phone prefixes--the first three digits of a seven-digit number--to tiny geographic regions, or “rate centers.” The system is a holdover from the days when, as in Lily Tomlin’s one-ringy-dingy era, a separate switch was needed for almost every community. Local phone companies cling to the outdated system because it enables them to “rate” calls between communities as toll calls.
Phone company lobbyists are now calling on Congress, urging legislators to pressure the FCC to accept 10-digit dialing. Lawmakers should keep in mind that the phone system doesn’t exist to make it easy for the phone companies to issue numbers and bill calls.
