What Area Code Is 917
917 Area Code is a telephone area code primarily used in 5 boroughs of New York city. 917 Area code numbers are used in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island & The Bronx. 917 Area Code is part of the North American Numbering Plan or NANP for these 5 boroughs of New York and it is an overlay code numbering plan areas (NPAs) in the city. Initaly, 917 Area code numbers were assigned only for cellphones, pagers and voicemail services to free up more numbers for landlines but later due to an FCC ruling, 917 Area code also began to be assigned for landlines. Area code 917 is an area code primarily assigned for 5 boroughs of New York city including Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island & The Bronx.
How it came into being
The New York Telephone Company asked the state's Public Service Commission yesterday for permission to assign a new area code - 917 - to the Bronx and to all cellular phones and paging devices in the 212 area, which now covers 2.5 million lines in Manhattan and the Bronx. In doing so, the company rejected several more costly and confusing alternatives, including dividing Manhattan into two area codes, putting all new numbers under a new code and transferring the Bronx phones into the 718 code assigned five years ago to Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Area code 917 is an area code primarily assigned for 5 boroughs of New York city including Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island & The Bronx. If nothing is done, the company said, it will run out of telephone numbers for the 212 area code by 1993. Adoption of the proposal, it said, would make enough numbers available in Manhattan, which would retain the 212 code, to last beyond the turn of the century.
If the commission approves the request, the 917 code would be assigned, starting in 1992, to all of the 500,000 residential and business clients in the Bronx and to the more than 100,000 mobile telephones and pagers in use in Manhattan and the Bronx.
''In our view, it is the exceptional answer to this problem, so we hope the fee will act favorably,'' said Steven Marcus, a spokesman for the company. ''There would be a duration of adjustment, however humans would get used to it.'' He introduced that there would be no additional charge for calls into or out of the new place code.
Asked about the plan, Edward S. Collins, a spokesman for the Public Service Commission, declined to remark on its prospects. But he mentioned that hearings would be held in New York City later this 12 months and that the seven-member fee would ''certainly receive comment from all fascinated parties.'' Under the corporation proposal, the change-over would start on Sept. 1, 1992, and would be optional for four months - that is, callers would reach 917 numbers whether or not they dialed 212 or 917. The switch in codes would turn out to be thoroughly fine on Jan. 2, 1993, when a caller wrongly dialing 212 would get a recording citing the need to use the 917 code.
In New York City - which acquired the 212 code in 1945, when the American Telephone & Telegraph Company adopted a nationwide system of place codes and seven-digit numbers to pave the way for direct dialing - the new code would be the second in much less than a decade. In January 1985, the 718 code was delivered for Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.
''At first, humans in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island had been unhappy -they felt they were being singled out,'' Mr. Marcus said. ''But these days anyone accepts 718 as being a section of New York City, and we're sure the same factor will occur in this case.'
