Gettin' Digits

By Matt Wood in News on Jan 29, 2007 12:56PM

Are carbs really bad for you? Does popping your knuckles really give you arthrits? And if kids shouldn't watch TV before age two, why did the Baby Einstein lady get a shout-out during the State of the Union address? Add one more confusing question that's particularly relevant to Chicagoans to that list: do we really need more area codes? Chicagoist pondered this back in December when we started noticing a new 224 area code for Evanston callers. After all those painful 312/773/708/630/847 splits, we thought we had plenty of numbers already, but alas, we chalked it up to progress. It's not like we actually memorize phone numbers anymore.

But just like that cool science teacher who told you to keep on cracking your knuckles because Sister Catherine was full of crap, two researchers from Chicago-based Citizens Utility Board say we have plenty of phone numbers to go around. Seamus Glynn and Martin Cohen studied the way phone numbers are allotted to carriers, and realized that most new combinations were being wasted. No matter how many numbers a carrier needs, they are assigned in 10,000-number blocks, hence, the proliferation of wireless carriers, IP phones, and fax services has more to do with the supposed shortage of phone numbers than does the popularity of cell phones and BlackBerries per household. Nationally, only 43.4 percent of available numbers have been assigned to customers. Glynn and Cohen convinced the FCC to pool the unused numbers instead of leaving them in carrier-specific blocks, ending the crisis.

With five area codes, Chicagoland has about 40 million numbers already. That should be more than enough for a while, even for your too-important boss who has two cell phones, a BlackBerry, and a pager.