The four digit extension will not change for any Brown phones. We needed to do this. It was inevitable that we were going to outgrow what we had. The decision to switch all student phone numbers to a new exchange was made to avoid having to give students phone numbers with a prefix different from their classmates'. The Communications Office plans to make the new dialing plan easy to use.
Most students are far from worried about a negative impact from the change.
A minor inconvenience will be reprogramming modems, auto-dialers, and fax machines. Every call to administration fax machines, for example, will have to be preceded by a 3 after the change. A humorous result of the new plan will be that two students will have as their phone number 867-5309, the title of a popular 1980s song by Tommy Tutone. The room is a freshman double, Jameson 123. Calls to numbers outside of Brown will not be affected.