Talk:Area codes 202 and 771

No overlay plans?
Quoth the article:

As of 2005, there are no plans to split or overlay the area code, probably since the total population of the District is less than 600,000, and the number of possible legitimate telephone numbers in an area code is more than ten times this number.

I slapped the citation needed template on this. It sounds reasonable on the face of it, but I'd bet that DC has an unusually high number of cell phone/blackberry numbers and copious amounts of office phones needed for the various agencies of the federal government. It's probably still not enough to merit an overlay, but the sentence as is smells of speculation. --Jfruh (talk) 19:10, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

I changed the sentence to reflect NANPA analysis rather than mathematical guesswork.

Robocalls
Is it notable that this is an area code used for political robocalls? -69.151.153.51 (talk) 01:58, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Are you referring to what shows up in caller-ID? Maybe 202 area code would cause some people to think it was some sort of official business? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.63.16.20 (talk) 16:39, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Clickable map
"Washington" should be changed to D.C. as it is referring to the District rather than including Seattle. 207.210.134.83 (talk) 21:09, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

allowing previously-forbidden prefix duplications
I saw the following, and will replace it with a reference to continued growth:

"The Washington area's one-LATA status limited the supply of available numbers on the Maryland and Virginia sides"

The problem is that the string I quoted comes AFTER the remark about removing area code 202 from the Md. & Va. suburbs (and requiring 10 digits for local calls in DC area crossing area code boundary). Prior to that, you had situations like this: 949 in use at Kensington (MD), and thus 949 not being useable in DC or the Va. suburbs because those were just a 7-digit local call from Kensington. The changes I mentioned in the paragraph you are reading would allow implementation of 202-949 (in DC, not MD), and also of 703-949 if 703-949 wasn't already being used in the 703 area beyond the DC area.

Also, I have inserted mention of the 703/540 split in Virginia, because that came before the 703/571 overlay in Virginia.


 * I think you're looking for exchange code protection? Not sure what LATAs have to do with anything, as NYC is one LATA but a mess of split and overlay codes with prefixes inevitably duplicated across area codes. K7L (talk) 15:16, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

"fast dialing" assertion can't be correct
The first paragraph goes on about how the speed of dialing is affected by the rotary-dial mechanism, but erroneously claims that 0 and 1 were used as the middle digit of area codes to speed up dialing. Dialing a 1 is certainly the fastest digit to dial, but zero takes the longest time for the dial to return to its rest position. (And it sends 10 pulses, not none.) So area code 201 is not the fastest code to dial, that would be 212. But the whole thing needs to be rewritten because the premise is false.

More in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adcva (talk • contribs) 20:26, 18 February 2015 (UTC)


 * No, it doesn't say that a '0' centre digit would "speed up dialling", nor should it say that. It says that area codes which covered an entire province or state were initially issued with '0' in the centre digit. Not the same beast... and yes, 1-212- is fastest as it doesn't have the centre '0'. The worst original codes were given to places like 1-902- Halifax, the Dakotas or the Carolinas. K7L (talk) 03:43, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
 * The whole idea that NPAs were assigned according to small pulse counts for large cities first, and large for small places, is total nonsense anyways. kbrose (talk) 15:32, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090129192336/http://www.nanpa.com:80/nas/public/npa_query_step2.do?method=displayNpa&npaReportModel.nasNpaId=202 to http://www.nanpa.com/nas/public/npa_query_step2.do?method=displayNpa&npaReportModel.nasNpaId=202

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