Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) was a flat-rate long-distance service offering for customer dial-type telecommunications in some of the countries that adhere to the North American Numbering Plan. The service was between a given customer phone and stations within specified geographic rate areas, employing a single telephone line between the customer location and the serving central office. Each access line could be arranged for outward (OUT-WATS) or inward (IN-WATS) service, or both.
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 international calling code 1. Some North American countries, most notably Mexico, do not participate in the NANP.
Automatic number identification (ANI) is a feature of a telecommunications network for automatically determining the origination telephone number on toll calls for billing purposes. Automatic number identification was originally created by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) for long distance service in the Bell System, eliminating the need for telephone operators to manually record calls.
Premium-rate telephone numbers are telephone numbers that charge callers higher price rates for select services, including information and entertainment. A portion of the call fees is paid to the service provider, allowing premium calls to be an additional source of revenue for businesses. Tech support, psychic hotlines, and adult chat lines are among the most popular kinds of premium-rate phone services. Other services include directory enquiries, weather forecasts, competitions and ratings televoting. Diplomatic services, such as the US Embassy in London or the UK Embassy in Washington, have also charged premium rates for calls from the general public.
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.
In telecommunications, directory assistance or directory inquiries is a phone service used to find out a specific telephone number and/or address of a residence, business, or government entity.
Number pooling is a method of reallocating telephony numbering space in the North American Numbering Plan, primarily in growth areas in the United States.
Area code 246 is the telephone area code in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for Barbados. Telecommunication services in Barbados are regulated by the Government of Barbados's telecommunications unit. The number 246 spells BIM on an alpha-numeric telephone keypad, a nickname for the island.
Toll restriction or toll denial is a feature offered by telephone companies which allows a line to be so programmed that it is impossible to originate long-distance calls from that line, or to accept charges reversed to the number by other parties. Such lines usually allow calls to be made to no-charge numbers locally and toll-free, so customers can still make some long-distance calls.
Phonewords are mnemonic phrases represented as alphanumeric equivalents of a telephone number. In many countries, the digits on the telephone keypad also have letters assigned. By replacing the digits of a telephone number with the corresponding letters, it is sometimes possible to form a whole or partial word, an acronym, abbreviation, or some other alphanumeric combination.
The area code 671 is the local telephone area code of the United States territory of Guam. It was created with the beginning of permissive dialing on July 1, 1997, replacing Guam's previous International Telecommunication Union country code 671 at the end of permissive dialing on July 1, 1998.
GOOG-411 was a telephone service launched by Google in 2007, that provided a speech-recognition-based business directory search, and placed a call to the resulting number in the United States or Canada. The service was accessible via a toll-free telephone number. It was an alternative to 4-1-1, an often-expensive service provided by local and long-distance phone companies, and was therefore commonly known as Google 411. This service was discontinued on November 12, 2010.
In the North American Numbering Plan, a RespOrg is a company that maintains the registration for individual toll-free telephone numbers in the distributed Service Management System/800 database. Their function in North American telephony is analogous to that of an individual registrar in the Internet's Domain Name System.
A teledotcom is a domain name that not only spells a memorable word but also has a matching toll-free telephone number. This means the word that spells something will have a toll-free prefix and a top level domain extension after it. A teledotcom can be accessible by either phone or internet address.
Telephone numbers in Canada follow the fixed-length Bell System format, consisting of the country code 1, followed by a three-digit area code, a three-digit central office code and a four-digit station code. This is represented as 1 NPA NXX XXXX, in which the country code is "1".
In telecommunication, a personal communications service is defined by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) as "a set of capabilities that allows some combination of personal mobility, terminal mobility, and service profile management".
A misdialed call or wrong number is a telephone call to an incorrect telephone number. This may occur because the number has been physically misdialled, the number is simply incorrect, or because the area code or ownership of the number has changed. In North America, toll-free numbers are a frequent source of wrong numbers because they often have a history of prior ownership. In the United Kingdom, many misdialled calls have been due to public confusion over the dialing codes for some areas.
Toll-free telephone numbers in the North American Numbering Plan have the area code prefix 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877, and 888. Additionally, area codes 822, 880 through 887, and 889 are reserved for toll-free use in the future. 811 is excluded because it is a special dialing code in the group NXX for various other purposes.
PrimeTel Communications is a telecommunications company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, nominally a service provider for toll-free telephone numbers. Founded in 1995, it is known for amassing large quantities of 800 numbers to redirect misdialed phone calls to erotic chat lines operated by National A-1, an affiliated company. PrimeTel acquires numbers that were previously registered and advertised, resulting in embarrassment when they advertise erotic chat lines. The company controls 1.7 million 800 numbers, as well as millions of numbers on other prefixes.
Toll-free number portability or freephone number portability allows the subscriber of a freephone number to switch providers while retaining the same number for incoming calls. Similar schemes exist in many countries for local number portability and mobile number portability, although implementation details for each portability scheme varies between countries.
