Hey, everybody from the 313, start thinking of new numbers to rally around-- the longstanding Detroit area code may be phased out.
Our friends over at the Detroit News report that pending a revised estimate next week, the North American Numbering Plan Administration will stop handing out 313 telephone prefixes on new phone numbers. Detroiters with existing cell phone lines would be able to keep their current area codes, while those with land lines would change.
via Detroit News:
The venerable 313 will ultimately become overtaxed. Even as Detroit’s population has fallen, cellphone usage has accelerated like one of those smoldering SRT Vipers that Dodge has been bolting together at Conner Avenue Assembly — which is, of course, comfortably within the confines of 313....
When the first five dozen area codes were assigned nearly 70 years ago, says NANPA’s Tom Foley, “that was expected basically to last forever.”
Instead, somebody invented fax machines, and then somebody else came up with cellphones, and lots of somebody elses decided to give them to 10-year-olds, and meantime the population grew to 300 million.
Now every telephone carrier is required to submit twice-yearly forecasts of its needs in each area code, factoring in everything from birth rates to the Detroit bankruptcy — “not something we stuck a number on,” Foley says, “but just something we took into account.
No word yet on what Detroit's new area code could be.
