Editor's Notebook: Ten Digits, No Problem

Making calls on campus to another student is wonderfully easy. You never have to dial more than five digits, and since everyone’s phone number begins with 3, you don't even have to remember all five. Thanks to the arcane workings of the Harvard Student Telephone Office, the change to 10-digit dialing within the Boston area this Monday probably won't affect you at all. But for those occasional outside calls to Tommy's that we do make, is dialing 10 digits really that bad?

Ten-digit dialing would cause a variety of minor nuisances, but none of the arguments that are often raised against it are convincing. Certainly, dialing 10 digits instead of seven would take a bit more time and slightly increase the chance that one would make a mistake in dialing. This complaint notwithstanding, the critics who warn of repetitive motion injury due to the additional finger movement have yet to experience the taxing finger-crunching of Pine.

The most plausible rationale for objecting to 10-digit dialing is that it would cause confusion about how to dial a specific number and how much one would be charged for a given call. This new dialing system, however, is surprisingly tolerant of common mistakes: adding a one before the area code would not result in an additional charge, and forgetting to dial the area code would trigger a recorded message informing the caller of the error. The remaining fault —complicated local dialing plans and non-geographically specific area codes—are representative of systemic problems within our telephone system that would be present in any case.

So who’s really causing these new problems? A knee-jerk reaction would cast blame on those people who have four cell phones, two pagers, a fax line, a modem line and five phone lines in their house. Granted, it might be a bit excessive to have more phone numbers than limbs, but the real problem is that telephone companies waste the phone numbers that are allocated to them by an archaic blocking scheme, dating back more than six decades, that wastes numbers on sparsely-populated rural areas.

People might be annoyed at having to dial 10-digits to call their neighbor, but this system is far superior to the alternative of having the boundaries between area codes shift, in order to make room for additional seven-digit numbers.

Recognizing the immense investment in the existing phone system, it is unrealistic to expect any major changes in its underlying structure. It is, however, entirely reasonable to move to a sane and consistent dialing system. In addition to freeing up even more numbers, moving to 10-digit dialing in all situations accomplishes this valuable objective. Just be thankful that we don't have 12-digit phone numbers yet, as some regulators are considering.