The Dominican Republic will be switching over to a ten-digit telephone system on 31 January. All local calls will now have to use the 809 area code allocated to the Caribbean many years ago, which was recently re-assigned to the Dominican Republic. Therefore, a local call to a domestic seven-digit telephone number as well as to all cellular phones will now have to be preceded by the 809 code. Calls to other cities or towns will now begin with the prefix 1 80Calls coming from overseas will remain the same. According to Jose Rafael Vargas, the head of INDOTEL, the rapid growth of telephone use in the country has hastened the introduction of the ten-digit phone number.