Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: nvuxr!deej@bellcore.bellcore.com (David Lewis) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: When We Run Out of NXX Area Codes Message-ID: Date: 21 Nov 89 14:29:04 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Organization: Bellcore, Livingston, NJ Lines: 42 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 526, message 5 of 8 In article , peter%ficc@uunet.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: > In my previous message, I mixed up exchanges and area codes. > Let's run this through again: > What happens when we run out of 3-digit area codes? Do we go to > 4-digit area codes, 8- or 9- digit local numbers, or split Zone 1? > (And, again, I know this will take a while.) Um, "a while" is somewhat of an understatement. NXX-NXX-XXXX has on the order of 6.4x10^9 (okay, 6.27x10^9 if you exclude N11 codes) available permutations. That, by my count, is over 6 billion possible phone numbers. Put another way, that's over 15 phone numbers for each person in North America. I don't know what the growth rate is for phone numbers, but we can do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. (Hey, I'm a systems engineer, what other kind of calculations do I do?) As of April '86 there were 14 available NPAs of the format N[0/1]X, and they were estimated to run out in 1995. That's 9 years for 14 NPAs. Err on the side of conservativism and say 2 NPAs per year. Interchangeable NPA codes will give 640 new codes, which should last on the order of 300 years. So by about 2300 we'll run out of NPAs. Hell, I have trouble getting funding to plan for 1995 -- and you want me to plan for 2300?? :-) Seriously, I feel fairly confident that by the time we run out of NPA codes, we'll have gotten ourselves to some sort of Universal Portable Communications -- a person has a single phone number which follows her/him around (or maybe two or three phone numbers -- one home, one work, one private or something). Which makes the whole problem irrelevant... David G Lewis ...!bellcore!nvuxr!deej (@ Bellcore Navesink Research & Engineering Center) "If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower."