The cities of Ezhou, Huangshi, Xiaogan, and Xianning in Central China's Hubei province will share the same phone area code with the provincial capital Wuhan by the end of this year, according to the Hubei Communications Administration.

If this pilot program of sharing the area code is successful, it will be expanded to all eight cities within the Wuhan 1+8 city cluster.

Wuhan 1+8 city cluster refers to a group with Wuhan as the core and a diameter of 100 kilometers, including Wuhan, and eight surrounding cities, Huangshi, Ezhou, Xiaogan, Huanggang, Xianning, Xiantao, Qianjiang, Tianmen.

The pilot program will enable people within this region to save on phone bills and help them foster a new identity, said an official with the Hubei Communications Administration.

Within the Wuhan 1+8 city cluster, there are 6.7 million fixed-line phone subscribers, accounting for 61.6 percent of all subscribers in the whole province.

By Song Jingli