Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Oct 29/01) - The end is near for the four-digit phone number in Inuvik. NorthwesTel has introduced a new phone exchange, meaning that before long, residents here will be forced to remember seven digits instead of just four.

Brian Medwid, 11, one of the first people in town who has to contend with a seven-digit number. - Lynn Lau/NNSL photo

NorthwesTel made the new exchange, 678, available June 1, and so far, about 25 new numbers have been assigned.

Four weeks ago when teacher June Medwid got her phone hooked up, she got a number beginning with 678, instead of 777. "I always have to explain it before I give it out, so people know there's a new exchange," she says.

Her son Brian has had to do the same. He recently gave his new number to a friend at school. "He didn't really get it," Brian says.

Although the town hasn't yet run out of numbers in the 777 exchange, NorthwesTel has been anticipating an increased demand, and started the process to get the new numbers last fall. "We like to be ahead of demand so we haven't exhausted all the numbers before we get a new exchange," says Anne Grainger, spokesperson for NorthwesTel in Yellowknife.

Theoretically one exchange should be good for 10,000 phone numbers and a cursory count of the numbers listed in the Inuvik directory adds up to just 1,515.

But calculating how much room is left in an exchange is a bit more complicated than that, Grainger says. NorthwesTel reserves certain ranges of numbers for special purposes -- 9000s are for pay phones, 1000s for cell phones, and some of the 100s (for example 7800 to 7899) can be reserved by larger companies or organizations.

When a community expands because of business growth, phone numbers go quick. "Business activity is the biggest trigger really," says Grainger. "That's where you start seeing the multiple assignments -- a person will have a work phone, modem, fax machine, pager, and cell phone in addition to their personal phone and Internet access at home, and then maybe they also have a kid's phone line."

Getting a new exchange involves applying to the North American Numbering Plan Administration (NANP) in Washington, D.C. operated by privately-owned NeuStar Inc., which controls all the area codes and exchanges for the publicly-switched telephone network in the United States, Canada, Bermuda and many Caribbean nations. NeuStar is a spinoff of satellite firm Comsat Corp.

The administration came up with some numbers available for this area code, and NorthwesTel picked. "678 should be nice and easy to remember," says Grainger.