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Big Number Change
The Big Number Change addressed various issues with the telephone dialling plan in the United Kingdom, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the country was running short of new telephone numbers. Overview The first was an update to a small number of geographic dialling codes in response to the rapid late-1990s growth of telecommunications and impending exhaustion of local numbers in several cities. The change greatly expanded the pool of available numbers within those places while retaining 'local dialling' (the ability to dial local numbers directly, without needing to dial an area code first). The change affected the dialling codes assigned to Cardiff, Coventry, London, Northern Ireland, Portsmouth and Southampton. The new numbers launched on 1 June 1999 and ran in parallel with the old numbers for a period until culminating in the large switch on 22 April 2000. All of these places moved to eight-digit local numbers ensuring sufficient local capacity for many decades ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Telephone Numbers In The United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom and the Crown Dependencies, 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. Telephone numbers are of variable length. Local numbers are supported from landlines. Numbers can be dialled with a '0'-lead prefix that denotes either a geographical region or another service. Mobile phone numbers have distinct prefixes that are not geographic, and are portable between providers. Structure All mobile numbers, nearly all geographic numbers, and nearly all non-geographic numbers have ten national (significant) digits after the trunk code ''0''. The overall structure of the UK's National Numbering Plan is: A short sample of geographic numbers, set out in the officially approved (Ofcom) number groups: In the United Kingdom, the "area code" is o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |