Maine won’t face the prospect of splitting into two area codes for at least another quarter century.
That’s based on the latest projections showing the 207 area code won’t be exhausted until 2050, according to the Maine Public Utilities Commission.
“The 207 area code is part of Maine’s identity,” the commission’s chair, Philip L. Bartlett II, said in a Friday afternoon statement. “We are pleased that careful number conservation measures and collaboration with the telecommunications industry have extended its life well into the middle of this century.”
The utilities commission began closely monitoring the 207 area code’s lifespan in 2018 as the number of service providers in the state increased, placing more demands on the shrinking pool of numbers.
Rumors of the 207 area code’s exhaustion have become a regular occurrence in recent years. Its last call was forecasted, in 2015, to occur by early 2019. That was then extended to 2024, and again to 2025, 2027, 2029, 2032, 2033, 2036 and, most recently, 2045.
In 2021, the prospect of splitting Maine into two area codes prompted the state’s congressional delegation to call on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to work with state regulators to save the 207, calling it a “cultural touchstone” and its preservation a “matter of efficiency.”
The utilities commission has investigated numbering practices of carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile to see whether they unnecessarily tie up large blocks of unused numbers within the 207 area code.
The commission has successfully worked with carriers to return hundreds of thousands of unused numbers to the 207 pool for future use.
The 207’s lifespan could be significantly lengthened once the state consolidates 135 calling areas into one “rate center,” a move the commission approved late last year.
Those 135 rate centers are served by Consolidated Communications Northern New England LLC, the largest of Maine’s remaining 24 landline service providers, also referred to as “incumbent local exchange carriers.” Those other 23 providers serve another 114 rate centers.
Take the second three digits within a phone number, such as Bangor’s 990. This corresponds to an “exchange,” which is assigned to a rate center that often but not always conforms to a municipal boundary. Each exchange has approximately 10,000 phone numbers assigned to it, think the last four digits of a phone number.
One of the key factors driving the exhaustion of the 207 area code is unused exchanges.
Each 1,000-number block within an exchange is assigned to a particular provider, and once they use at least 100 numbers within that block, no other provider can use them, tying up those much-needed phone numbers.
By consolidating the 135 rate centers served by Consolidated Communications, regulators have opened up a large quantity of phone numbers for use elsewhere. For example, a commission report noted last year that this move would make available another 336,000 phone numbers for the Bangor rate center, not that the Queen City will likely need that many any time soon.
While this would be the largest such consolidation of its kind in the United States, other states like Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska have used similar methods on a smaller scale to conserve phone numbers, according to the commission, which believes Maine’s effort could serve as a model for other states seeking to preserve dwindling phone number pools.
Maine is just one of 11 states with just a single area code. But the problem facing the 207 is just a part of a larger dilemma facing the nation broadly. The U.S. could run out of area codes by mid-century, which could prompt the switch from 10-digit to 12-digit phone numbers. Such a change could cost an estimated $270 billion, according to the utilities commission.
Regulators continue to pursue other options to extend the lifespan of Maine’s 207 area code.
