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Canada and the United States have experienced rapid growth in the number of area codes, particularly between 1990 and 2005. The widespread adoption of fax, modem, and mobile phone communication, as well as the deregulation of local telecommunication services in the United States during the mid-1990s, increased the demand for telephone numbers.
In NANP telephone number specifications, the letter N represents a numeral from 2 through 9, while the letter X represents any numeral. Thus, NXX is a number from 200 through 999, while XXXX is a range from 0000 through 9999. The first three digits of a telephone number are the numbering plan area code (NPA code, or simply NPA).
The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) divides the territories of its members into geographic numbering plan areas (NPAs). Each NPA is identified by one or more numbering plan area codes (NPA codes, or area codes), consisting of three digits that are prefixed to each local telephone number having seven digits.
This was accomplished by adding the digit "9" to the beginning of any phone number that started with a "9" (government and semi-government connections), and adding the digit "3" to any phone numbers that did not start with the number "9". [1] It is common to write phone numbers as (0xx) yyyyyyy, where xx is the area code.
The format of the toll-free number is called a non-geographic number, in contrast to telephone numbers associated with households that are geographic. (Since the advent of cell phones and voice over IP, households can have any area code in the U.S., but it is still geographic in the sense that calls from that area code are considered local, but ...
In several European countries, a different strategy prevailed, known as the open numbering plan, which features a variance in the length of the area code, the local number, or both. [3] United States telephone numbers often included letter prefixes and telephone exchange names, which were more easily memorable for users than long digit sequences.
In December 1930, New York City became the first city in the United States to adopt the two-letter and five-number format (2L-5N), which became the standard after World War II, when the Bell System administration designed the North American Numbering Plan to prepare the United States and Canada for Direct Distance Dialing (DDD), and began to ...
On July 16, 2020, the FCC adopted rules to establish 988 as the three-digit phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. [2] This required 82 area codes to switch to mandatory ten-digit dialing by October 24, 2021, because they had already used 988 as a central office code .