November 22, 2004

• look here
• My guess: it's all about pattern recognition. On a landline phone, you don't have the equivalent of a "send" key like you do on a cellphone. So the sequence you dial has to be unique and unambiguous without an end-of-sequence marker like "send" for hugely diverse situations like: area-code required local dialing (301 for MD suburbs from DC, for example), international calls, newer-format area codes (versus the old "x1x" and "x0x" pattern).
• el_hombre, are you sure that's the answer, because I dial without a 1 on a landline to a local number. For example, I can dial 610-abc-defg from a 215 area code, without the 1.
• I think it's more to indicate that you understand the call you are making isn't in your local call area and therefore may be subject to additional charges, with cell phones the majority of them make no distinction between a local and a long distance call.
• Primary Interexchange Carrier The long distance company that is automatically accessed when a customer dials 1+. Cell phones are different as LD is paid by the carrier; Consumers are capable of changing their LD company; Or not, a la the barage of 10-10-220, etc. This was a way for LD companies to circumvent having to "switch" customer's PIC. PIC was / is used to prevent slamming.
• Axex, the same is true for any local area with more than one area code. I think this is because the call is still considered local, and not billed to long distance, so the 1+ is not required. Another explanation from here: One Plus - 1+ Customer ability to access the long distance service provider of their choice by first dialing 1, then the long distance number. Equal Access guaranteed by the 1982 AT&T MFJ. 1+ is an outbound service where the calling station pays the charges. On preview: what Allesklar said.
• Because the phone company SAID SO. Now eat your brussel sprouts and go clean your room.
• Here in my bit of Southeastern Michigan, we're required to dial 10 digits, land or cell, even if we're just calling next door. Obviously, it was confusing at first, now it's just second nature.
• back in the day, for local calls we only had to dial 5 numbers not the entire 7. Of course we were also on a party line when I was a kid and had rotary dial phones.
• jccalhoun, when I was a country kid, my phone number was 447. Townies got the big five-digit numbers, though.
• oh hey, I didn't even know I didn't have to use the 1 key to dial long distance on my cell. Thanks.
• When I grew up, my phone number was 2250, and we shared a "party line" with our neighbor 2205. Need to call your neighbor? Simply dial, then hang up, wait for him to answer, and pick up the phone again! Incoming calls where easier though, the phone would ring on two different frequencies. 2250 and 2205 would have different types of phones, each weighing upwards of 50 pounds and conveniently leased from ma bell. That was in the 80s in rural Oregon. It wasn't all bad though, we still had a drive-in movie theater until the late 90's. Now it's a church. I hope the irony is not lost on the congregation.
• You can also sort of guess how all this worked out yourself by starting from the (correct) assumption that when phone dialing (as opposed to operator dialing) in the US was implemented, dialing the phone was like navigating a series of switches. This is why local exchanges have the same first three three digits of the seven--if there was only one local exchange and everything else was long distance, then you could only dial the four final digits of the number. My small town, even up to when I moved away in 1983, still allowed one to dial five digit phone numbers, starting with either a 6 or a 9, because there were two exchanges, 356 and 359. Area codes were always in the form of x0x or x1x, and that's how the switches could distinguish them from local exchange three digit code...for a long time there wasn't x0x or x1x local exchanges. And no numbers started with a "1", that always sent it to the long-distance switch. Some metro areas got so crowded that they ran out of numbers to use for local exchanges. But they still needed to make things local. So a transition began where the whole number, area code and exchange and the four digits, became sort of a hybrid of a complete package unique number and one still signifying a heirarchy. But from a tech standpoint, the switches dealt with the whole number--so in some areas you now have to dial the entire number, even for local calls. The computerized system decides what's a long-distance call and what isn't and charges you accordingly. The whole system is now computerized, really, and these heirarchies are abstracted and in this way still exist; but it doesn't so much reflect the real mechanical operation of switches any more. Which it did. (Because, if you didn't figure this out, phones are a "switched" connection where, originally, you were making a physical dedicated connection from your phone to the phone you were calling by way of navigating a series of switches.)