Phones Have Double Digit Inflation French Callers Will Now Have To Dial Two More Numbers

With a massive media blitz and an army of operators, France’s phone company introduced new 10-digit numbers on Friday to a nation belatedly gearing up for the Information Age.

At 11 p.m., the country added two digits to the beginning of every number, expanding telephone capacity by hundreds of millions of lines for an explosion of modems, faxes and cell phones.

State-owned France Telecom hopes introducing the new numbers, at a cost of $1 billion, will fuel a technological leap for a country that has lagged behind other Western nations in the use of advanced telecommunications.

“France has been less eager to adopt modern communication devices than other industrial countries,” said Thierry Mileo, an executive at the cellular phone operator Bouygues Telecom.

France Telecom had 3,500 operators on hand to answer last-minute questions before computers automatically switched French phones to the new system.

The phone company blitzed television airwaves with a colorful series of dancing-digit ads to make sure the public understood the shift. Full-page newspaper and magazine ads, radio spots and billboards were seen and heard all over France in recent weeks.

The new Paris numbers start with “01,” numbers in the northwest “02,” northeast “03,” southeast and Corsica “04,” and southwest “05.”

Callers from outside France omit the zero; so, for example, dialing the Paris area from abroad, which previously required a 33-1 prefix, does not change.