DeKALB | Starting Saturday, all callers within the 815 area code will be required to dial 1 and the 815 area code to reach any 815 telephone number.

The only exceptions for NIU students and faculty are calls made to and from residence hall rooms and NIU administrative offices – numbers beginning with 752 or 753.

“This is called 10-digit dialing,” said Teri Reid, manager of ITS NIU Telecommunications.

A new area code, 779, will be applied to the 815 area starting March 17.

Current DeKalb residents will keep their 815 area code and new residents will have 779 as their area code.

“This wasn’t a decision to change local calling numbers; we’re running out of numbers in the 815 area,” Reid said. “The Illinois Commerce Commission held open forums in 2006 and a decision was made to overlay area code 779 within the 815 area. With an overlay, you have to dial 10 digits because both area codes exist in the entire area.”

Students living in the residence halls are equipped with phones that program up to 30 recently dialed numbers. To complete calls to those numbers, students can dial “*” and a one or two-digit code they assign to a phone number.

For people that live and work at the university, 10-digit dialing outside of NIU is a small inconvenience that will take some getting used to, Reid said.