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Telephone companies have hoarded as many as 1 million phone numbers in less than a year, forcing the Milwaukee area to split up its 414 area code years sooner than expected.
The dramatic run on phone numbers is coming mostly from new telephone companies that do not need the numbers today but are stockpiling them for future customers.
This means the Milwaukee area will grapple with the unfamiliarity of a new area code next year while a vast trove of 414 numbers goes unused.
"It points out that the current system . . . is perhaps not the most efficient way to allocate numbers," said Gary Evenson, deputy administrator of the telecommunications division of the state Public Service Commission, which regulates telephone companies.
Last week, officials announced that the 414 area code was quickly running out of numbers and that, without a fix, Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin would exhaust the supply in the first quarter of 1999.
To stem the loss of numbers, administrators of the North American Numbering Plan on June 11 temporarily stopped assigning phone numbers in southeastern Wisconsin. Since Aug. 1, they have instituted a plan to conserve phone numbers.
The Public Service Commission has been asked to approve a new area code plan for 414, and officials of the North American Numbering Plan said they would like to have it in place by August 1999.
Telephone companies in Wisconsin, including Ameritech, are recommending that the commission adopt an overlay plan, in which people with a 414 number would keep it but new lines would get the new area code. All callers in 414 would have to dial 10 digits to make a local call -- even if it's to someone across the street.
The other option is to split 414 into a new, geographically based area codes. One plan under study would keep most of Milwaukee County as one area code, presumably 414, and the rest of the region would get a new area code.
Last fall, 414 was broken up for the first time when Green Bay, the Fox Valley and communities as far south as Jefferson, Campbellsport and Oostburg switched to 920 on Oct. 25. When 920 was created, it was believed that 414 would have enough new phone number combinations to last about eight years.
Officials said last week that the need for more numbers is being driven by two reasons: by the explosive use of second phone lines, cell phones, pagers and fax machines, and by deregulation. As new companies move into the market, they reserve blocks of numbers for free for potential customers.
It appears now that the key reason phone numbers are running out so fast is because of deregulation -- companies are stockpiling them.
Phone companies sought and received a total of 1.4 million telephone numbers in Wisconsin between November 1997 and June 11 of this year, according to Lockheed Martin Information Management Services, which is the new administrator of the North American Numbering Plan.
Although phone companies don't publicly disclose how many of the numbers they actually use, it's safe to say that most of those numbers are not being used today, according to the PSC's Evenson.
The telecommunications industry is growing rapidly but, Evenson said, not at a pace of 1 million new phone numbers in Wisconsin in less than a year. No single company, he said, has added hundreds of thousands of new customers in the last seven or eight months.
Ameritech is Wisconsin's largest local telephone company, and company records show that it has 2.2 million phone lines in the state. No. 2 provider GTE Corp. had 479,000 lines at the end of 1997, GTE records show.
"Nobody's doing anything wrong. It is just the way the system has been set up," said Evenson, who keeps track of competition among local telephone companies.
But there has been grousing within the industry that some companies have been taking advantage of their ability to obtain as many numbers as they want.
Until recently, numbers were assigned in blocks of 10,000 by Ameritech, the local phone number administrator that is turning the job over to Lockheed Martin. If a phone company needed 2,000 numbers, rules for allocating numbers said it would be given 10,000 numbers anyway.
"This is part of the problem of why they are being gobbled up so quickly," Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Rebecca Barnhart said. "They are being assigned in blocks of 10,000."
Barnhart said that plans to conserve numbers are under way in several cities, including Chicago and Milwaukee, where the cache of usable numbers is dwindling.
"Our overall attitude is that it appears that companies are getting poised to enter the residential market," said Ralph Deptolla, a spokesman for Ameritech. "And to do that, you have to reserve phone numbers."
Wisconsin took its first steps to deregulate the local telephone market in 1993. By this summer, six companies with their own telecommunications facilities were competing in the local market, and another 18 were reselling services from other local telephone companies.
Most companies target high-volume business customers.
Despite these inroads, Evenson said, incumbent providers such as Ameritech still dominate the local market, especially for residential service.
Time Warner Communications specializes in the business market, and the company says that its customers ask for more numbers than they need.
One reason is that a block of numbers with the same first three digits is a "marketing identity for a business," said Bob Meldrum, a spokesman for Time Warner Communications.
"We deal have lots of customers that want blocks of numbers. Whether they use them all is up to them," Meldrum said. "They need these numbers for anticipated growth.
"We are certainly not hoarding blocks of numbers."
Representatives of MCI and of AT&T, which recently completed its acquisition of TCG Milwaukee, both said that they reserve numbers based on a forecast of what they will need in their expansion into local-phone service.
Both companies said they are in favor of plans to conserve the supply of numbers by doling them out in smaller increments.