(“Area codes 570 and 272” are telephone area codes serving the northeast quadrant of ‘Pennsylvania’, including the cities/towns of ‘Scranton’, ‘Wilkes-Barre’, ‘Williamsport’, ‘Stroudsburg’, ‘East Stroudsburg’, ‘Pittston’, ‘Carbondale’, ‘Hazleton’, ‘Clarks Summit’, ‘Towanda’, ‘Bloomsburg’, ‘Sayre’, ‘Tunkhannock’, ‘Berwick’, ‘Milford’, ‘Montrose’, ‘Honesdale’, ‘Mount Pocono’, ‘Nanticoke’, ‘Sunbury’, ‘Jim Thorpe’, as far south as ‘Pottsville’ and as far west as ‘Lock Haven’)
(570 is the main area code, while 272 is an ‘overlay’ covering the same territory as 570)
(570 was split from area code 717 on 5 december 1998)
(it was the first new ‘Pennsylvania’ area code created outside ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Pittsburgh’ since the implementation of the ‘area code system’)
(in 2009, it was projected that 570 would run out of numbers in the third quarter of 2011)
(the ‘Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission’ considered four options—an ‘overlay plan’ and three ‘split plans’)
(all but one of the splits would have left ‘Scranton’ and ‘Wilkes-Barre’, the two largest cities in the 570 territory, within the same area code)
(on 15 july 2010, the PUC decided the new area code, ‘272’, would be implemented as an ‘overlay’)
(‘272’ officially entered service on 28 march 2013)
(‘ten-digit dialing’ became mandatory in northeastern Pennsylvania on 21 september 2013)
(the implementation of 272 means that the only parts of ‘Pennsylvania’ that haven’t been overlaid are the ‘Susquehanna Valley’ (717) and ‘west-central Pennsylvania’ (814))