PAT: Please do NOT display my email address where ever it might appear!
On Thursday 5 Jan 2006, Mark Crispin <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU> wrote
in "Re: Cost of POTS w/o Long Distance":
> With Qwest in Washington State, the only way of getting out of having
> to pay a monthly fee for long-distance access is to sign up for
> something called "Managed Long Distance", which prohibits you from
> using 10xxx and 10xxxxx numbers and international dialing.
The old 10-XXX+ Long Distance Dialaround code format is totally
obsolete now. It was replaced by the expanded 101-XXXX+ code format
over a phased period in the 1990s. Those previously assigned 10-XXX
codes were permissively dialable as 101-0XXX, or the "so-called"
10-10-XXX or "ten-ten". However, that is a misnomer, since there were
also 101-5XXX and 101-6XXX codes in use during the transition, since
it turned out that under the shorter, older format, there had never
been any 10-10X codes, nor 10-15X or 10-16X codes. Thus, permissive
use of 101-0XXX and new 101-5XXX and 101-6XXX codes didn't conflict.
By 1998 in the US, and 2000 in Canada, the expanded 101-0XXX+ format
was mandatory for calling the previous 10-XXX+ codes. And since 2001,
in addition to 101-0XXX and the "new" 101-5XXX and 101-6XXX codes,
there have been codes from the entire "generic" range of 101-XXXX.
However, it might be a long time before the four-digit -xxxx format
would run out. I don't know if the plans are to really expand to
10-xxxxx, i.e., '1', '0', and then five posssible 'x' digits, i.e.,
where the third digit in the full dial-around code could be digits
other than just '1'.
Anthony Bellanga (anthonybellanga@spam-poison.com)