ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Voice - Data - Video Discussion International cell phone codes

Just as a side comment on cellphone calls, I've seen comments from ex-pat Brits complaining about the way they get charged for incoming calls to cellphones in the U.S. and how it should be done the "correct" way as in Britain.

Personally, I think North America adopted the right approach. If you want the convenience of being able to receive calls on a mobile phone, why should you not pay for it? Why expect the person calling you to pay more for your convenience?

Quite a lot of people here simply will not call a cellphone number. Comments such as "Give me a proper number, I'm not calling that" are far from rare.

Paul:

With modern digital switching, the actual numbers dialled have no relevance to the call charging or routing. So the common european number plan issue is no longer technically relevant.

I can see the logic of creating pan-european services though. 00 800 2222 3333 is far easier to market across the entire EU than 25 seperate national toll free numbers.

and 112 and 00 make a lot of sense.

In terms of competition they could remove national telecom market boarders without disrupting the existing numbering arrangements.

e.g. allowing one GSM network to exist in multiple EU states as a single network without roaming.

Thank you all for your assistance, give me your account numbers.

I have some interesting thougts about this process: the silly situation of mobile or local city=county prefixes are not in connection with the (uhh, hard words...) infrastructure or development of the nations. For ex. Jamaica has about 200 mobile prefixes (Which doesn't mean all starts with 9)
Or you can call the main cities for a very low, usually about 0,025EUR/min price, when you pay about 0,5EUR/min thru the normal telephone lines.

Otherwise I'd welcome the idea of choosing the same prefixes for the same purpose, for ex. mobile can start with 9, DC 1.

Russia and Kazakhstan has the same 7, whenever the price of a call is more than double price for K. So I had to check the net for all the city prefixes in K. to make difference in the counting.

Wow, it's been a long week, but this topic made it easier.

Thank you again!

In Canada:
I know a person whose cell phone number was that of the same local exchange that wired phones get.

However both our cell phones are on a new exchange,supposedly cell specific, in another town.

In the US, they have number portability, which means you can take your number across cell, VOIP, and POTS providers. (I may be a little liberal, but the gist is there is no cell specific prefixes anymore.

I think the eventual scenario is that the US providers will stop charging for incomming calls and the european providers will stop charging for calls terminated on their networks.


So eventually, in maybe 10 years max, calls to mobile phones will be the same as calls to fixed line phones.

It will just take a little more time for competition to really take hold in a big way and drag prices dramatically downwards.

I can see plenty of ways this could be done, e.g. the VOIP operators operating as virtual networks on existing mobile infrastructure ..

In this case the prices for Canada and the USA are the same even the mobile prices.

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Thank you.