Area codes 204 and 431

Area codes 204 and 431 are the North American telephone area codes for the Canadian province of Manitoba, encompassing the province. 204 is one of the original 86 area codes assigned in 1947 in the contiguous United States and the then-nine-province extent of Canada.

Contents

• Area codes 204 and 431
• Communities included
• References

The incumbent local exchange carrier for the 204 and 431 area codes is MTS.

In 2009 the Canadian Numbering Administrator forecast that area code 204 would be exhausted within a few years, despite a population of only 1.2 million people in the entire province. While an area code provides 7.8 million numbers, Canada uses an allocation scheme which allots all 10,000 numbers of an entire central office prefix to competitive local exchange carriers even for the smallest hamlets, rather than implementing methods of number pooling. Once allocated, it is not possible to re-assign numbers to a different rate center. The situation was exacerbated by the proliferation of cell phones, particularly in Winnipeg.

In July 2010, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission approved a province-wide overlay with area code 431, for implementation in November 2012. On July 30, 2012, 10-digit dialing became mandatory throughout the province. This method was preferred over a geographical split of the numbering plan area, because MTS and other carriers in the province wanted to spare their customers, particularly in rural areas, the expense and burden of changing telephone numbers.

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