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Thirty million telephone subscribers face chaos if, as planned, all
their numbers are changed overnight during Easter weekend in 1994. To increase
the pool of available numbers to cope with demand, all 30 million numbers
in Britain will have to gain a digit, in most cases a ‘1’ near the beginning.
Industry claims that the change could cost subscribers £100 billion.

Neither British Telecom, nor its rival Mercury, nor Oftel – the Office
of Telecommunications which the government created to protect the public’s
interests – has made any effort to warn customers that some electronic equipment
will no longer work after the change, and some equipment will be impossible
to modify.

Oftel, BT and Mercury deny the change will cost as much as £100
billion, although they admit that they have not carried out any research
into the true cost, or how much equipment will have to be junked. ‘We won’t
know until it happens,’ says Alan Croft, BT’s project manager for the national
code change. A spokesman for Mercury says: ‘We are investigating.’

Oftel cites a report by the consultants Ovum, which estimates the cost
at only £1 billion. Most of this is the cost of changing stationery
and signs. But at a telecommunications conference late last year, estimates
of between £10 billion and £100 billion were discussed. Richard
Cox of Mandarin Technology, an independent consultancy based in Cardiff,
believes the figure will be at least £11 billion.

Last September, Bryan Carsberg, director-general of Oftel, authorised
the change, promising that it would ’cause less disruption for customers’
than other options that would have kept the number of digits the same. For
London subscribers it will be the second change in four years.

Adding the extra digit means that all telephone equipment with a memory,
from office switchboards to domestic memory phones, fax machines, computer
modems, automatic fire and burglar alarms and emergency helplines for the
aged, will need to be reprogrammed. Alarm systems are deliberately designed
to resist reprogramming by anyone other than an authorised engineer.

Most important, although Oftel says the change is from 9 digits to 10,
this ignores the zero that prefixes long-distance calls and brings the total
number of digits to 11. Some equipment will not handle more than 10 digits.

Cox warns that the software on which all modern switchboard equipment
relies to route and bar calls will have to be rewritten. The National Computing
Centre in Manchester says that for a company with a private network of 20
switchboards, it could take months and cost up to £100 000 to modify
them. Cox also warns that ‘smart boxes’, which automatically route long-distance
calls via Mercury to save money, will need modification.

BT now says it will start writing to business customers this spring.
Mercury and Oftel have no plans yet to warn subscribers. ‘It’s quite a long
way off,’ says Mercury.

Mandarin Technology has come up with an alternative scheme which avoids
adding a digit by expanding the areas which have underused codes. This,
claims Mandarin, would provide another 200 million numbers and tide Britain
over until the end of the decade, when the European Commission plans further
changes to harmonise European numbering.