New Codes Do a Number on Mexico Callers

From the bus station to the national legislature, Mexicans are playing a numbers game.

Four hundred new telephone area codes were adopted last fall, all at once, and the changes still confound many long-distance dialers here and in the United States.

The Mexican government ordered the changes, which added two or three digits to every phone number in the country, to meet an increasing demand for new numbers. For U.S. callers to Mexico, the changes are to go into effect in May, but many are finding the old numbers already out of service.

At Mexico City’s busy northern bus terminal, Rosario Fuentes is on the front lines, working for a company that charges travelers about a dollar a minute to make phone calls for them.

“I take the number they give me, add the new area code on, then you start crossing out digits from the left, and when you have 10 digits, you have your number,” she explained matter-of-factly, flipping through pages and pages of new area codes in her shoe box of an office. “It works most of the time. But there are a lot of people who leave here furious. Livid. They can’t get through.”

The largest cities--Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey--received two-digit area codes to use with eight-digit phone numbers. All other cities were assigned three-digit area codes for their seven-digit numbers.

In the United States, area code changes have spurred rousing public debate and sometimes accommodation by phone companies. In Mexico, the changes adopted in November came with not even a grace period in which new and old phone numbers worked simultaneously.

Now each state has so many area codes that many callers say they are baffled. Zacatecas, a state roughly the size of Maine in terms of population and square mileage, now has 16 area codes. Maine has one area code.

Life and Death Situation

Felipe Delgado, owner of the Delgado Brothers Co. picture frame business in Los Angeles, tried mightily, but ultimately failed, to place a call to Zacatecas a few weeks ago. He had been asked to reach the family of an employee whose brother was so sick, it was feared that he would die. The employee did not know the new area code for his family’s village, so Delgado, a Zacatecas native, asked his own relatives there for help. The relatives called Mexican operators but repeatedly got busy tones; once they got through, they were given the wrong code, Delgado said.

“This really caused a lot of anguish for my worker. It was a grave situation. The only luck was that the brother did not die. He survived,” Delgado said. “These changes are totally illogical, and they pose a real problem for immigrants here who don’t have enough information to even call home.”

The telecommunications industry spent $9 million to publicize the area code changes in Mexico with fliers, television advertisements and notices in bills, said Guillermo Montero, planning director for the Mexican Federal Telecommunications Commission.

Even so, it seems that many callers didn’t get the message.

Some complain that lists issued by the largest telephone company, Telefonos de Mexico, or Telmex, include incomplete or erroneous information. Callers who make mistakes get a 10-second message directing them to another number for information, but many say that’s not enough time to write down the number.

Telmex, once a giant state monopoly, was privatized in 1990 and has since struggled to improve its image and service. The company says these complaints are unfounded and cited a survey of 2,000 callers that showed that 90% had no problems with the new area codes.

Still, reports of confusion come from all walks of life.

An assistant to the national legislature couldn’t figure out how to get through to a legislator on his cellular phone. A taxi driver who takes people from Mexico City to Guerrero state lost a $100 fare because he could not track down his passengers.

“I was so mad,” said the driver, Miguel Pozos Vargas. “I never knew what happened to them. I tried calling relatives in Guerrero to help me, but we couldn’t figure it out.”

Domestic Confusion

Before Susana Gonzalez’s recent trip to Mexico City from the port city of Tampico, she and her family sat down to figure out how to call the brother who was to pick her up. Her mother said to add one 5 to the phone number. Gonzalez suggested two 5s, and her uncle said no 5s at all. None of those options worked. Gonzalez said the family tried to call the operator but got only repeated busy signals.

“I never saw my brother while I was here. It’s a real shame,” Gonzalez said as she ran to catch a bus for the trip home.

This is not the first time Mexicans have suddenly had to change their calling patterns. In the last four years, the government has ordered changes to prefixes, used before the area codes, for national and international calls.

“It’s hard for people to change. In any country, a change like this one would take 10 years. We have done it in four years,” said Telmex spokeswoman Concepcion Rivera. “To ask millions of people to change the way they make calls was a big request. . . . The speed of these changes made the people crazy.”

Montero, of the federal telecommunications commission, said Telmex and other phone companies chose the cold-turkey conversion because it would have cost millions of dollars to temporarily keep the old and new area codes in place at the same time.

“We really had no choice but to do this. We would have run out of numbers had we not,” Montero said. “We feel it’s been a success. There were only some problems at the beginning.”

One of them was right at Montero’s office. Mexico’s secretary of communications and transportation fired the president of the telecommunications commission just days after the new area codes took effect. Mexican media such as the respected newspaper El Financiero said the decision stemmed from the “megaconfusion created by the new dialing system,” but Montero said the decision was unrelated.

He did concede that “it would have been better had there been more publicity. It’s not easy to change and make people add digits to their calls. There might have been a more gradual way to do this.”

For more information about area codes in Mexico, consult https://www.telmex.com/internos/english/areacode/areacode.html, or ask an international operator.