Area code 780

When in 1947, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) announced plans for organizing the telephone networks of North American into a unified continental telephone numbering plan, Alberta was recognized as a single numbering plan area (NPA), receiving area code 403, as one of the original eighty-six area codes.

Within only a year, area code 403 was threatened by exhaustion because of the rapid growth of telecommunication services demand for pagers, cellphones, and computer modems, as well as growing competition among providers.

For mitigating the threat of exhaustion, the northern two thirds of Alberta, including Edmonton, was split from 403 on January 25, 1999, receiving the new area code 780.

[4] On September 20, 2008, Telus Mobility began to assign 587 telephone numbers to new customers in Calgary and Edmonton.

[8] Until its merger with Telus in 1995, over three years prior to the startup of 780, the municipally-owned Edmonton Telephones (Ed Tel) served as an ILEC.