Area code 250

Area code 250 is an area code for most of the Canadian province of British Columbia, including Vancouver Island. It was created on October 19, 1996, as a split of area code 604, which was retained by the Lower Mainland.

Contents

• Communities included
• Relief planning
• References

The area code also serves the United States community of Hyder, Alaska, which sits along the border near the town of Stewart.

The incumbent local exchange carriers are Telus, Northwestel and CityWest in the city of Prince Rupert.

By the mid-2000s, 250 was already on the verge of exhaustion, due primarily to Canada's inefficient system of number allocation. Canada does not use number pooling as a relief measure; each carrier is allocated blocks of 10,000 numbers in each rate centre where it plans to offer service, even in the smallest hamlets. While most regions do not need that many phone numbers, once a prefix is assigned to a rate centre, it cannot be allocated elsewhere. This has resulted in thousands of wasted numbers, a problem exacerbated by the proliferation of cell phones and pagers. It was decided to make 778, which had been an overlay area code for Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, an overlay for the entire province starting on July 4, 2007. Overlays have become the preferred method of area code relief in Canada; no area codes have been split since 1999. However, it is probable that an overlay would have been chosen in any event as another split would likely have been implemented by leaving area code 250 assigned to Vancouver Island and assigning the rest of the province, outside the Lower Mainland, a new area code. The region's carriers did not want to force their customers (particularly in rural areas) to change their numbers for the second time in a decade.