🚀 go-pugleaf

The overall management of telephone numbers (the North American Numbering
Plan - NANP) is currently being handled by Bell Communications Research, the
entity jointly owned by the seven regional Bell holding companies.  It
worries about such things as shortages of 950 numbers, etc.

Among the problems it is currently wrestling with:  how will ISDN telephone
numbers be assigned?  For example, if AT&T starts offering ISDN service
direct to large customers via the primary rate interface, what will the
destination number of these customers look like?  One proposal would assign a
new area code (like 700) to AT&T and let AT&T hand out destination numbers to
its customers.  The problem with that is that the area code no longer tells
you anything about the geographic location of the number.  The other
possibility would be to give AT&T an exchange code to use IN EACH area code.
This is how it works for the non-wire line cellular telephone carriers.  The
problem here is that exchange codes are in short supply in some areas -- like
617, etc. -- until they get split into two area codes.  By the time you hand
out ISDN exchange codes to AT&T, Sprint, MCI, etc, you've used up a lot of
exchange codes.  This issue is being discussed in something called the NANP
Forum which is coordinated by Bellcore.

In general, a complete re-working of the NANP is scheduled for the 1995 time
frame when telephone numbers
will probably go from 7 digits to 8.  

Last year the French reassigned some 24 million subscriber telephone numbers
to a uniform 8 digits in a massive cutover.