It used to be “Tel.:” (short for Telephon/Telefon) and “Fax”, but recently the annoying fad seems to have taken over the business cards of writing “fon” and “fax”, which I think looks retarded.
I wonder if with this example we’ve ended up with an exception to the rule, where there’s been renumbering, or simply extra area codes introduced.
Or, maybe, 01992 = 01WX2, WX=Waltham Cross?
Well, technically, the zero isn’t part of your area code; it’s the trunk access digit, which announces to the system that a trunk call specified with an area code follows. I’ve never figured out why so many people include it on the front of their area codes, and then have to resort to the awkward (0) convention to remove it from the area code when quoting their numbers internationally. Was that the way telecom agencies specified writing national numbers originally?
This led to even more fun when dealing with area codes that actually did start with zero. Moscow used to be area code 095, and you’d dial +7 095 xxx xx xx from international, and they kept having to explain that the zero was part of the area code and had to be dialled. They changed it to 495. I’m sure the trunk dialling digit confusion was part of the reason.
When I was in electronics school, one of the courses covered the North American telephone system, and they said that the round brackets () surrounded items that were optional in a phone number. At the time, we wrote our phone numbers (416) 555-1212, because pretty much every number could be dialled locally from somewhere without needing an area code.
Now dialling the area code is mandatory in large areas, including the 416 area code, and you increasingly see numbers written as 416-xxx-xxxx. That’s proper; the area code is no longer optional.
We still have a choice of trunk access digit though, and we can dial 1-416-xxx-xxxx or 0-416-xxx-xxxx depending on what kind of call we are making. In many areas local calls do not take a trunk access digit, and we just dial 416-xxx-xxxx.
For digits in pairs, as in France (1 23 43 22 22 for example, where 1 is the area code) I believe that in French people say French phone numbers as the equivalent of “one twenty-three forty-three twenty-two twenty-two” instead of “one two three four three two two two two”. So they group them that way.
Area codes used to always be within parentheses when all out of area code calls were long distance. But now many metro regions have multiple area codes so people don’t bother with the parentheses anymore.
I’m not sure I follow all of your detailed explanation, because I also wonder if we used another (electronic) system in my country (Germany). Now, I can’t remember back to the 50s and 60s (I have to ask around for that), because I was only born in the 70s (Without asking, I don’t remember ever reading or hearing about the mix of letters and numbers you had). But in the 80s, the area code 089 for Munich was normal, with a zero. It was always written that way: Tel.: 089-12 34 56.
I’m not a technican, so I have no idea about trunks. But I never heard them mentioned during normal conversation with telephone people. Maybe we don’t have them. We also have far less operators - I think it used to be for international calls, and for calls from West Berlin to East Berlin in the 60s, but most of the time, we dial ourselves (and the computers do the rest). Area codes were always - that is, from the 80s onward - written with the 0, because they had 3 (or 5, for the smaller villages) digits. So 030 is Berlin, and 08072 is a small village in Bavaria. And the area code plus the individual number together don’t exceed a certain length (I think it was 9 digits originally, and several years ago, they changed it to 11 digits all together, because so many more people were getting telephones, they needed more space to avoid doubles, but I’d have to look up to be sure).
I never heard of this. I doubt something similar happened in Germany. Are you sure the problem was over in Moscow, and not in the US side of the system?
Area codes are not mandatory all the time here. If you live in the city you are calling, you only dial the number, so from Munich suburb Bogenhausen to suburb Sendling, I dial 12 34 56 78 (numbers have been enlarged). If I’m in another city, Berlin, and I want to call Munich, I dial 089-12 34 56 78.
Area codes are only mandatory if you are dialing from a cell phone: even if I’m standing in Munich, I have to dial 089-12 34 56 78, because the cell phone doesn’t otherwise know where I want to call.
But then, we also have fixed “area codes” or pre-codes (literally) for mobile providers - I think you have a different system in the US for that? So if my sister is with provider O2 or whatever, her mobile phone number has the prefix 0162- 98 76 54 321, while her home number in her village is 08079-123 45 and her office number is 089-456 78-1230 (the dial-through in her company).
Meanwhile, my other sister, with a different provider, will have a prefix of 0172. In both cases, I know from dialing the prefix that I’m dialing a mobile phone, and my telephone company can bill me accordingly. I was amazed to read here on the Dope that in the US, the person who is called on the mobile has to pay for the call!!! (Esp. considering calls from salespeople, which are annoying enough already, without having to pay for them). In Germany, the person who places the call pays the higher charge. (Maybe you people should get your system a bit more organized? 
)
Also, when I’m thinking about getting a mobile phone, the usual advice is to look at which provider most of my friends/office = the people I’ll be calling most of the times have, because most providers offer calls in their system cheaper than calls to other companies. So I don’t need to ask everybody, I just look at the prefixes and know that the prefix 0162 is company A, and prefix 0172 is company B.
Well, the reason you put the 0 in front of the area code is so the system can tell that you’re dialling an area code. Using your example, if you’re in Munich and you start dialling a call with a number 1 to 9, the system knows that it’s a local call. If you start dialling 0… the system knows that an area code follows. But the 0 isn’t actually part of the area code; it’s just a signal announcing that an area code is next.
It’s different here in Toronto.
I must dial the area code on all calls: for example, 416-xxx-xxxx. (We have four area codes within local calling range, but I won’t get into that just at the moment.)
Since all calls in my area now start with the area code, the trunk-access digit is no longer necessary to indicate an area code. It becomes more of an indicator for long-distance calls.
This is significant because even now, with inexpensive telecommunications, long-distance calls are typically charged by the minute, while unlimited local calls are included in most phone plans. And twenty years ago, long-distance calls were much more expensive. So this ‘toll-indicator’ function of the trunk-access digit was as important as its use to signal a following area code.
For a local call, I do not need to dial a trunk-access digit, so I just start off with the area code. For long-distance calls, I dial either 1 or 0 before the area code.
There is actually some variation in use of the trunk-access digit across the North American Numbering Plan. In some areas outside Ontario, the 1 or 0 still indicates that an area code follows; it’s dialled even on local calls.
And yes, mobile numbers are mixed in with landline numbers here in Canada and the USA. Mobile phones are assigned a ‘home location’, whose area code they use.
The Greater Toronto area has four area codes: 416, 905, 647, and 289, which are used by both mobiles and landlines. My landline is 416-xxx-xxx; my mobile is 647-xxx-xxx (it used to be 416-xxx-xxxx, but I asked for a new number due to spam-fax harassment). You can even ‘port’ your landline number to a mobile phone!
And this page at World Telephone Numbering Guide describes the changes in Russian area codes.
So if dialing area codes and other prefixes are becoming necessary in almost all cases, everywhere (even when dialing within the same area code), why not universally drop the use of parenthesis all together?
The Illuminati knows that moving the paranethesis (sometimes called brackets) to some other part of the phone number (country code or whatever) would likely create even more confusion. So we know they can’t be moved. And since we pretty much have to dial the numbers within them anyway, I return to rephrase my original question: Why are parenthesis still being used at all?
This realization that we need to dial all digits, all the time, could help explain an emergence of periods (or dots) in Western culture, as using periods suggests that every number of the sequence must be dialed, every time, to reach the desired recipient. (?)
Because in some areas of the North American Numbering Plan, area codes are still optional for local calls.
The area code used to be optional for long-distance calls within the same area code–you could dial 1-xxx-xxxx for certain long-distance calls inside large area codes, like 705 in Ontario–but that ended in the 1990s.
The need for parentheses will not end until all of the NANP has ten-digit dialling. But even in regions where area codes are mandatory, a lot of people are still used to using them. Heck, there are still store signs in Toronto that have phone numbers in the 2-letter, 5-number format (“Dave’s Old-Time Diner. Telephone LE. 4-1212”), and that ended in the fifties!
Okay, first, I asked an older friend about the German telephone system before the 80s. His reply:
until WWII, there were telephone operators who had to manually route calls. In the 50s, when the system was built up again*, mechanical switchers were built in, so everything started off with numbers. No letters (Butterfield 256), but 123456. They also devised the area codes according to size: big cities Berlin, Hamburg, Munich have three-digits area codes, so there 6 digits left for individual numbers (to add up to 9 total) because many people live there. Mid-size cities like Cologne have 4 digit codes, and small villages have 5 digits, since there will be many villages, but not many people in each village. (sometime in the 90s, the format had to be expanded to 11 digits total, because more people had phones, but only the new numbers were longer, the people who already had a phone kept their number.
Operators after the war were only used for special international calls (difficult to reach countries) most calls were self-dial.
*one of the advantages of building from scratch as opposed to adding to an existing infrastructure is that you start with the newest tech and a good system. This is also why East Germany has one of the most advanced telephone and cable systems ever: after the re-unification in 1989, the telephone companies were in the process of switching over from copper cable to fiber optic cable. Since during the communist time, relativly little (close to none compared to the West) cable had been laid, the phone company could simply lay fiber optic cable anywhere. It wasn’t a problem of tearing up a street and incovencieng people for months to replace a working system with a better one - as in the West - it was the case of tearing up the street and installing any system at all which was necessary, anyway, so they put in the newest stuff.
Actually, here in Germany, the 0 signifies a change of cost: besides the area codes, there are other prefixes like 0180x (service numbers) and 0190x (expensive serivce - not only sex lines, but also consumer advice fax lines, for example. You pay small amounts of money by dialing an expensive number - a simple system.)
That was one aspect (free local calls) that was never part of the German phone company’s plan. (Until sometime in the 90s, there was only one phone company Telekom, part of the federal post system Deutsche Bundespost. Only later were competing companies allowed.
That’s just unbelievable. Don’t the customers get … upset/puzzled as to being this old-fashioned? Do the younger generations understand it at all? How do you dial it?
To give you an example of the different type of Shared-Cost-Services
0180 1 0,039 Euro per minute
0180 2 0,06 Euro per call
0180 3 0,09 Euro per minute
0180 4 0,20 Euro per call
0180 5 0,14 Euro per minute
0190 - numbers have been switched off for good after too much misuse; instead, we now have 01379 numbers that allow for higher billing. see for example here
Here it was fairly common in London to see signwriting with out of date area code combinations on it, given that they had changed the system several times in quick succession, but now the turnover of vehicles and storefronts seems to have caught up with it.