Proposed New Area Code Meets With Busy Signal

Eastern Washington will continue to have just one area code for the foreseeable future.

State regulators Wednesday turned back an industry effort to impose a second area code on counties east of the Cascades.

Instead, telephone companies serving Spokane County - where new numbers are most in demand - were ordered to pool thousands of numbers they have not yet put to use.

The same rule will later be expanded to include all of Eastern Washington.

Glenn Blackmon, assistant director for telecommunications at the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, said Friday that as many as 300,000 of the 1.6 million numbers assigned to Spokane are warehoused.

Another 20,000 numbers are available in surrounding areas, he said.

In April, the telephone industry and a private company that manages the nation’s numbering system recommended that the state supplement the 509 area code with a second because rapid innovations in telecommunications were increasing demand for new telephone numbers.

A new, undesignated code would be necessary by April 2002, according to their calculations.

They supported an overlay plan that would leave an area intact, but assign a new area code to all new subscribers. All phone users would dial 10 numbers, not seven, to make their connections.

While the 509 area code has been used since 1957, Western Washington has been split and resplit into a quartet of area codes. A fifth area code will be introduced next October.

The WUTC staff, which acts independently of the three commissioners, has resisted the second area code proposal from the outset. Number pooling was suggested as an alternative in a memo issued early last month.

The commission accepted a modified version Wednesday.

Unless there is a change, pooling will begin on July 8, 2001.

Blackmon said telephone service providers will have to submit blocks of 1,000 unused numbers to a third party, Telcordia Technologies, which will reassign them as needed. “The companies are not allowed to buy and sell phone numbers,” he said.

Qwest officials estimated the change will delay the need for a new Spokane County area code at least another 10 months, he said. For the rest of Eastern Washington, the reprieve could be as long as 30 months.

“We think that’s a very conservative estimate,” Blackmon said.

In Chicago, he noted, a number-pooling system implemented three years ago continues to forestall adoption of another area code.

Blackmon said the chief opponent of pooling was Qwest, the largest provider of telecommunication services in Washington.

Theresa Jensen, Qwest director of regulatory affairs, said hardware and software costs associated with number pooling may exceed $20 million.

Switches, for example, must be modified to read 10 numbers - area code, prefix and suffix.

Now, Jensen said, all 10,000 suffixes associated with a prefix are owned by the same company. Once a switch has read the prefix, it knows where to route the call, and who provides the phone service.

That will no longer be the case.

Qwest, for example, may own 5,000 prefixes; XO Communications, 2,000, and other providers the remaining 3,000.

Jensen said modifying equipment will cost more than it will for competitors because they own fewer and newer switches than does Qwest.

She said Federal Communications Commission rules require states to pass on costs to all telephone users.

That could be done by extending a 43-cents-per-month charge that covers system changes that allow customers to keep the same telephone number if they switch telephone service providers, she said.

The charge is due to expire after two years.

Consumers might prefer dialing 10 digits to paying the additional charge, Jensen said.