Area code 250 is a telephone area code in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for the Canadian province of British Columbia outside the Lower Mainland, including Vancouver Island–home to the provincial capital, Victoria–and the province's Interior region. In addition, the numbering plan area extends into the United States community of Hyder, Alaska, located along the Canada–United States border near the town of Stewart. The incumbent local exchange carriers that service the area code are Telus, Northwestel, and CityWest in the city of Prince Rupert. History Area code 250 was created on October 19, 1996, as a split of area code 604, which was retained by the Lower Mainland. Prior to 1996, 604 had been the sole area code in British Columbia for almost half a century. British Columbia would have likely needed another area code in any event because of the province's growth in the second half of the 20th century, but the split was hastened by Canada's system of number allocation. Canada does not use number pooling as a relief measure. Instead, each competitive local exchange carrier is allocated blocks of 10,000 numbers (corresponding to a single prefix) in each rate centre in which it plans to offer service, even in the smallest hamlets. Once a prefix is assigned to a carrier and rate centre, it cannot be moved elsewhere even if a rate centre has more than enough numbers to serve its customers. That has resulted in thousands of wasted numbers, a problem that has been exacerbated by the proliferation of fax machines and pagers and then of cell phones. By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, 250 was already on the verge of exhaustion, again because of the number allocation problem and the continued proliferation of cell phones, particularly on Vancouver Island and in the larger cities of the interior. Amid projections that 250 would be exhausted by January 2008, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission began considering relief options in early 2007. Proposals included: a geographic split that would have left 250 with the interior and switched Vancouver Island to a new area code expanding area code 778, previously a concentrated overlay for Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley, to the 250 territory concentrated overlays covering part of the 250 territory Several of the major landline and wireless providers in the 250 territory strongly favoured an overlay and stated that it would