This story appeared in The Times & Free Press on Wednesday, April 7, 1999.

Knoxville To Get New Area Code

By Dave Flessner
Business Editor

Nearly a half million phone numbers in East Tennessee will get a new area code this fall.

But in a surprise move Tuesday, state regulators decided to designate the Knoxville area for the new area code. Southeast Tennessee and Upper East Tennessee are expected to remain in the existing 423 zone for at least the next five years.

The new area code, which must still be assigned a number by the North American Number Plan Administration, will be activated in October and will be mandatory by next February.

"This is great for Chattanooga," said Thomas L. Smith, national facilities director for U.S. Xpress Corp., which handles more than 2,500 calls a day at its Chattanooga headquarters from all over the country. "If we had had to change our area code it would have been expensive to print new business cards and stationary and repaint all our trucks. But even worse, we probably would have lost some business altogether if our phone numbers changed."

The 423 area code, which was split off from the 615 area code less than four years ago, is quickly exhausting its available numbers because of the growth in mobile phones, fax numbers, pagers and competitive phone providers.

The telephone industry had recommended that instead of splitting the 423 zone, a new overlay zone be added in the same region and new phone numbers be assigned to the new area code. But that change would have required everyone in East Tennessee to dial 10 digits even for local calls and phone numbers might have had different area codes even in the same building.

The Tennessee Regulatory Authority rejected both the industry recommendation and historical precedent Tuesday in deciding to create a new area code within the biggest metropolitan area in the zone. Traditionally, existing area codes are maintained in major cities and the surrounding suburbs and towns get the new area codes when a zone is split.

TRA directors decided to give Knoxville the new area code because the Knoxville calling area had fewer numbers and would therefore involve fewer changes than the rest of the area code.

"It was not an easy decision for the TRA to make," said Eddie Roberson, director of the agency's consumer services division. "The decision to allow the Chattanooga and Tri-Cities areas to maintain use of 423 had to do with the combined number of business and residential access lines in those calling areas versus the same number of lines in the Knoxville calling area."

The new area code in the Knoxville local calling area will have about 445,000 numbers and will include eight counties that border Knox County -- Anderson, Blount, Grainger, Jefferson, Loudon, Roane, Sevier and Union. The rest of the 423 area code, including Chattanooga and the Tri-Cities, has 685,000 numbers.

Ellen Bryson, executive director of the Tennessee Telecommunications Association, said the industry would have preferred an overlay zone but will move to implement the new East Tennessee area code.

"The industry has experience in doing both overlays and splits," she said. "We think that ultimately everyone will go to 10-digit dialing and carry their number with them no matter where they go. But for now, we just need to go about the business of implementing this."

The TRA delayed a decision on the new area code last month after the Knox County Emergency Communications District complained about having to change its numbers. Barry Furey, executive director of the Knox County Emergency Communications District, said his board questioned the need for adding a new area code when many phone numbers assigned to new phone providers are still not used. Because phone companies are assigned switches with blocks of 10,000 numbers each, new phone competitors with a limited number of customers often have many phone numbers in an area that have not yet been used.

"We have asked for an estimation of how many of the 423 numbers are actually exhausted and we were never given a firm answer," Mr. Furey said.

The industry says it isn't able to easily quantify precisely how many number are in use in an area code. But TRA estimates that the nearby 615 area code in the Nashville area will exhaust its available numbers within the next couple of years.

TRA will then face a similar decision about whether to split the 615 area code around Nashville or add an overlay zone for new phone numbers.

The number crunch is coming from both new technologies and deregulation. The average business and household has twice as many phone numbers as a decade ago because of fax machines, mobile phones and pagers. Additionally, the deregulation of the telephone company has opened the way for new local phone competitors, which are also assigned huge blocks of numbers.

"We're looking at a number of ways to conserve numbers and avoid having to continually add more area codes," Ms. Bryson said.

Pending approval from Lockheed-Martin, the contractor responsible for administering area codes in the United States, the new area code in Knoxville will start on Oct. 1. For four months, callers will be allowed to dial either the new or the old area code for Knoxville. But the permissive dial period will end by Feb. 1, 2000.

Copyright © 1999, Chattanooga Publishing Co. All rights reserved.