We're using up a resource too quickly in Alaska, and now it's in danger of running out. Area code 907, which has carried all Alaskans on its back for more than half a century, is scheduled to run out of new phone numbers sometime around late summer 2012. Hoping to delay that deadline as much as possible, regulators have started looking at ways to conserve phone numbers. And if they can't, Alaska will get a second area code.
In a state as large and diverse as this one, area code 907 competes only with the Permanent Fund dividend for touching the most Alaskans. There is no shorter shorthand than those three numbers. If the day comes when they represent only some Alaskans, our far-flung population will suddenly be flung just a little bit farther apart.
How does a state with less than 700,000 people use up an area code with 792 million phone numbers? Area code 808, which covers all of Hawaii, a state with nearly twice as many people as Alaska, isn't expected to run out of phone numbers until late 2020.
Like so many problems facing Alaska, it's a question of scale.
Phone companies get phone numbers in blocks of 10,000, called prefixes. A prefix is the first three digits of your phone number. Most companies don't need that many numbers, though. Around 40 percent of the service areas in the state have less than 100 phone numbers, according to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. Thousands go unused.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 unintentionally compounded this problem by introducing competition to the phone industry. Suddenly, more companies needed prefixes, sometimes to go after the same small towns. More phone numbers got stranded. Brent Struthers is with NeuStar Inc., the company that manages the numbering system. In the late 1990s, he worked on the Illinois Commerce Commission, one of the first bodies to take a look at how to extend the life of an area code. "It had never been an issue before," Struthers said. "I don't think it was really something that came up in great detail while we were considering the '96 Act. It sure did afterward though."
Populous areas like the corridor around Chicago felt it first. California alone ended up with a dozen new area codes in the late 1990s. New York City got four new area codes and an episode of Seinfeld. Utah and Nevada got new area codes for their rural halves.
Alaska has remained ahead of the curve. We still have nearly 200 unassigned prefixes, each with 10,000 numbers, which should give the state enough time to extend 907.
"It's really impossible to tell, though," Struthers said. "Each area code is different."
Conserving phone numbers is a game of consolidation. One trick is "number pooling," where those big blocks of 10,000 get broken into smaller blocks of 1,000, and given to other companies. But pooling requires certain technology. Without it, phone calls can get routed incorrectly, including 911 calls. While some phone companies in Alaska already pool numbers, others just don't have the technology, and acquiring it can be expensive. Another trick is to pack more towns into a single prefix. That would mean forcing entire communities to get new phone numbers but would increase the area for local calls.
Every solution is burdensome, but the relative hassle for a state doesn't compare with the problem nationally. The minds at NeuStar are pondering the day when the continent runs out of three-digit area codes, a telecom Y2K currently expected to happen around 2038.
In major cities, a new area code is often laid on top of the boundaries of an existing area code. But when it comes to smaller states like Alaska, most get split in two when a new area code comes along.
It's not hard to imagine the battles over how to split Alaska. Most likely Southcentral, where so much stationary would have to be reprinted, would be cordoned off and allowed to keep 907, while the rest of the state adjusted to life with a brand new area code. Once regulators choose the new area code, there is a transition period where callers learn about the change from recorded messages.
Then, eventually, calls stop going through.
If Alaska becomes a two-area code state, the loss will be felt first in whatever cranial gland secretes frustration, as recorded messages keep reminding callers to dial again. It will be felt next in the pocketbook. Companies would need new stationary, new signs, new logos. Employees would need new business cards. A surprising number of devices use local phone numbers, from alarm systems to credit card readers to ATMs. Toll-free calls get routed through area codes. So do emergency calls. Those connections would need to be fixed.
Those costs can be measured, though.
A second area code would be felt hardest in Alaska's soul, a place dinted by every new road through the wilderness and bruised each time Pilot Bread threatens to discontinue its product. Only 13 states still have a single area code. For a small state, it's a symbol of community. It means the population, forever expanding in size and changing in composition, still fits between the curved arms of a single set of parenthesis, like a hug.
But area code 907 hits a deeper truth about Alaska: This is a state of nine.
Alaska got area code 907 because of its remoteness. For an isolated place without many people, the North American Numbering Plan saw no reason not to assign an area code that took the forefinger to the inconvenient nether regions of the rotary dial for three straight trips. Compare 907 with the relative ease of area code 212 for New York City.
For the same reason, Alaska got its 99- zip codes because of geography. The zip code system runs from east to west, running from 00 in Puerto Rico to 999 in Ketchikan.
The number nine works well for Alaska. It's the frontier of single-digits, with a rounded top and pronged spur that nicely mimic that great bulge of Bush Alaska pushing into international waters, and the long spindle of islands that make up the Aleutian chain.
Every area code has a personality. Take North Texas, where (214) is parochial, nearly-cosmopolitan Dallas; (972) and (469) mark the suburban sprawl stretching the city to the east, north and south; (817) and (682) cover the rural counties resisting the pull toward Fort Worth, a city with a museum designed by Louis Kahn, and a rodeo every summer.
An Alaska with two area codes would be no different. For a state that already struggles to find common ground between its urban and rural halves, between its native-born residents and its myriad transplants, another area code would probably mean further retrenchment.
Or perhaps that's too dramatic. Area code 907 doesn't actually introduce every Alaskan phone number. The Southeast community of Hyder uses area code 250, co-opted from nearby British Columbia. And Hyder is still well enough Alaskan, thank you very much.