idb wrote on Dec 7
th, 2009 at 3:08am:
catj wrote on Dec 6
th, 2009 at 11:20pm:
The trick in the allocation of area codes is that a single code needs to cover a fairly wide geographical area. It would be crazy for one city to be divided up by multiple codes. The US has that nightmare scenario in place.
I'm far from convinced that the system here is such a nightmare. Within a thirty or so mile radius of where I lived in the UK, the area codes 01892, 01622, 01634, 01732, 01689, 020, 01322 and 01959 were in use, possibly along with others (memory has faded a little). This really is no different to say the situation in New York city with its five area codes serving a population of eight or so million. At least the system here is consistent and understandable with fixed-length area codes and a standard format.
Google just told me: New York — Area Code: 212, 315, 347, 516, 518, 585, 607, 631, 646, 716, 718, 845, 914, 917
So, I'd think that it's a pretty good bet that anybody living there is almost certain to have to dial the full 1-nnn-nnn-nnnn for virtually every number they need to call.
Quote: In comparison, the Ofcom-administered system is a mess. If one set out to deliberately design from scratch the most useless and complex system, then the result wouldn't be far removed from the UK numbering scheme. Whilst our system is far from perfect, and it has its particular challenges, it works very well here, in Canada and in quite a few other nations and territories, both near and far.
Well it wasn't designed from scratch, of course - It's all down to history. Originally, every city, town, village and hamlet had it's own manual telephone exchange. Your phone number would be, say, Medway 21. As they got bigger, numbers were tacked on the front, so you may end up with Medway 654321. Originally you'd pick up the phone, speak to the operator, and they would put you through. Eventually, you could dial other numbers on your own exchange directly, but "trunk" calls would still need connecting by the operator. Although there were often "short-cut" codes, such as 91, that would take you to an adjacent exchange. (apparently it was possible to get most of the way across the country by daisy-chaining these, but it made for very long dialing sequences, was not officially supported, and as you used lots of local connections, call quality suffered!) When STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialing) came along, the GPO needed a way of mapping exchange names to numbers, so they used the first two letters of the exchange name, and a sequential number to differentiate them. So Medway became ME4. With a 0 on the front to indicate it's an STD call, that was 0634. As most phones were supplied with letters marked on the dial next to the numbers this meant people only had to remember one extra digit, the 4 in this case.
As we don't have our towns arranged around the country alphabetically, this distributed the numbering about fairly randomly, but this was beneficial in that it was unlikely for another 063n to be nearby, so making it less likely that people would be likely to dial the wrong one. Bear in mind that people were much less likely to have any dealings with anybody non-local in those days.
By this route, all but the very smallest of exchanges got their own area codes. The tiny ones would usually end up tacked onto the nearest big town, using the towns STD code and the shortcut code to reach their exchange. This is why we ended up with numbers such as (0xxx xxx) xxxx.
Obviously, as things have got sorted out, as number use has increased, things have got a bit more rational; village exchanges have been absorbed into the main towns, the NGN and mobile numbers got separated out, and the whole industry got opened up.
Obviously there is still some way to go, however I think it's a little more logical to be able to tell at a glance the usage of, and thus approximate cost to call, a number. Yes, some areas are running out of numbers, but I'd rather they move to shorter area codes than overlay another code, as otherwise you end up with the situation we had in London where, as soon as 071/081 came in, people stopped being able to dial local numbers for a proportion of their contacts, and indeed, often didn't know what prefix to dial for any given number.