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The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) is a telephone numbering plan for twenty-five regions in twenty countries, primarily in North America and the Caribbean. This group is historically known as World Zone 1 and has the telephone country code 1. Some North American countries, most notably Mexico, do not participate in the NANP.
A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefix similar to an area code. The specific service access varies by country.
A telephone numbering plan is a type of numbering scheme used in telecommunication to assign telephone numbers to subscriber telephones or other telephony endpoints. Telephone numbers are the addresses of participants in a telephone network, reachable by a system of destination code routing. Telephone numbering plans are defined in each of the administrative regions of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and in private telephone networks.
In the United Kingdom, telephone numbers are administered by the Office of Communications (Ofcom). For this purpose, Ofcom established a telephone numbering plan, known as the National Telephone Numbering Plan, which is the system for assigning telephone numbers to subscriber stations.
The Australian telephone numbering plan describes the allocation of phone numbers in Australia. It has changed many times, the most recent major reorganisation by the Australian Communications & Media Authority taking place between 1994 and 1998.
In Argentina, area codes are two, three, or four digits long. Local customer numbers are six to eight figures long. The total number of digits is ten, for example, phone number (11) 1234-5678 for Buenos Aires is made up of a 2-digit area code number and an 8-digit subscriber's number, while (383) 123-4567 would be an example of a Catamarca number.
The Big Number Change addressed various issues with the telephone dialling plan in the United Kingdom, during the late-1990s and early-2000s.
The area code 868 is assigned to Trinidad and Tobago, a member of the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). The telephone numbering plan for the country is known as the National Numbering Plan. It is part of a system used for assigning telephone numbers in Trinidad and Tobago, and functions as a part of the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). It is regulated by the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago, which holds responsibility for telecommunications in the country.
Numbers on the Irish telephone numbering plan are regulated and assigned to operators by ComReg.
Widespread UK telephone code misconceptions, in particular brought on by the Big Number Change in 2000, have been reported by regulator Ofcom since publication of a report it commissioned in 2004.
020 is the national dialling code for London in the United Kingdom. All subscriber numbers within the area code consist of eight digits and it has capacity for approaching 100 million telephone numbers. The code is used at 170 telephone exchanges in and around Greater London as part of the largest linked numbering scheme in the United Kingdom. In common with all other British area codes the initial '0' is a trunk prefix that is not required when dialling London from abroad.
Telephone numbers in Oceania use a variety of area codes to denote their location along with their own area code depending on the country's geographic makeup. They also have other prefixes to denote different types of mobile services and international calls. There are exceptions because of regional variations and time zones.
The format of telephone numbers in Australia has changed over time to allow for the expansion of the subscriber base as technology has improved.
PhONEday was a change to the telephone dialling plan in the United Kingdom on 16 April 1995. It changed geographic area codes and some telephone numbers. In most areas, a "1" was added to the dialling code after the initial zero. In Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield, the area codes were replaced with new codes and the subscriber numbers gained an extra digit. The PhONEday changes also made provision for new ranges of subscriber numbers in those five cities. A £16m advertising campaign, and an eight-month parallel period during which both old and new codes were active, preceded the change. PhONEday followed a change made in May 1990, when the old London area code 01 was released from use, permitting all United Kingdom geographic numbers to begin with this prefix. Originally planned in 1991 to take place in 1994, in 1992 the change was postponed until the Easter Sunday bank holiday in 1995.
The regulation of telephone numbers in Germany is the responsibility of the Federal Network Agency of the German government. The agency has a mandate to telecommunications in Germany and other infrastructure systems.
National conventions for writing telephone numbers vary by country. While international standards exist in the form of recommendation E.123 by the sector ITU-T of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), national telephone numbering plans define the format of telephone numbers assigned to telephones and similar communication endpoints.
A telephone number is a sequence of digits assigned to a landline telephone subscriber station connected to a telephone line or to a wireless electronic telephony device, such as a radio telephone or a mobile telephone, or to other devices for data transmission via the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or other public and private networks.
Ranges for fictitious telephone numbers are common in most telephone numbering plans. One of the main reasons these ranges exist is to avoid accidentally using real phone numbers in movies and television programs because of viewers frequently calling the numbers used. In North America, the area served by the North American Numbering Plan (NANPA) system of area codes, fictitious telephone numbers are usually of the form (XXX) 555-xxxx. The use of 555 numbers in fiction, however, led a desire to assign some of them in the real world, and some of them are no longer suitable for use in fiction. Other areas have different fictitious telephone numbers.
Telephone numbers in the United Kingdom have a flexible structure that reflects their historical demands, starting from many independent companies through a nationalised near-monopoly, to a system that supports many different services, including cellular phones, which were not envisaged when the system was first built. Numbers evolved in a piecemeal fashion, with numbers initially allocated on an exchange-by-exchange basis for calls connected by manual operators. Subscriber numbers reflected demand in each area, with single digit telephone numbers in very rural areas and longer numbers in cities.
References
- 1 2 Malone, Sam (18 April 2013). "New phone numbers for Cardiff as first sets of 029 prefixes begin running out". Wales Online. Retrieved 25 June 2023.