New Area Code for Alberta to be Announced

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced on Wednesday, Oct 30, that Alberta would have a new area code starting from April 9, 2016. Any new number in the province is going to start with 825, CRTC said.

It is only four years since Alberta received the third prefix to its numbers. On the other hand, the present prefixes (780, 587 and 403) are going to run out by July 2016, according to the Canadian Numbering Administrator. The majority of other provinces have single digit or double digit area codes, whereas British Columbia already got four digit codes. The highest number of digits is present in the area code of Ontario (13) while Quebec has 10.

The rapid growth of the local codes shows how fast cell phones are getting popular among the masses. It also shows how rapidly Alberta's population is growing. It was under three million for Alberta before 1999. The entire province had only one area code, 403. However, one more area code (780) was introduced in January 1999. Another area code (587) was announced in September 2008. Thereafter, it became mandatory to have a 10-digit local dialling. Statistics Canada mentioned that the population of Alberta is over four million at the moment.

The mandatory 10-digit dialling was apparently not accepted well by Albertans in the beginning. Voice actress Belinda Metz gave a hilarious interview in 2008, where she was humorously referred to as "the most hated person in Alberta" as it was her recorded voice that had reminded people to dial the mandatory 10 digits for local calls. Metz said that people had started hating her all of a sudden. She said that she was a good person who was trying to assist people in getting through the new phone system.

Liz Sauve, the spokesperson of Telus, agreed that customers may have an emotional attachment with their phone number. However, service providers do not hesitate much to accommodate the demand of a specific area code over the other, she said.