Thus spake "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
Face it, 7D is dead; and even if overlays had not arrived, cell phones would have killed it. Once you learn to think 10D, it's trivial.
Oh, you ignorant rednecks.* Even my cell phone has 7D dialing and it'll be a century before overlays arrive where I live.
Great. Store 7D numbers in your phone's directory and drive a few hours in any direction; see if they still work. _That_ is why mobile phones are killing off 7D, not because of dialing patterns or overlays.
I really appreciate not having the insane Texas plan where you have to memorize every single local prefix to be able to make a fripping phone call.
When you have seven nearby area codes (like I do), and parts of each of them can be local or toll, there's no hope of memorizing prefixes. You guess based on the distance, and you either get through or a recording tells you that you guessed wrong. If you thought a number was local and it turns out to be toll, that may make you think twice about whether you need to find a closer number or perhaps not talk as long. I find it to be nuts that some places have 7D toll calls and 11D local calls; how can you have any clue what (if anything) you're paying without calling the operator? Back before CLECs, SWB's phone books had a map with the prefixes assigned to each exchange and rules to determine if a call was local or toll. Now, with ten times as many prefixes per exchange (and several possible area codes for each) and new prefixes being added every week, that's simply not practical anymore. S Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do." K5SSS --Isaac Asimov