CS200CAP@st1.vuw.ac.nz (Pat Cain) (07/04/90)
>Sweden has recently introduced a service called "Sverige Direkt" >(Sweden Direct) which is a list of free telephone number that you can New Zealand has recently introduced this service too, although there seems to be problems with it such as: * bad connections * having to wait a long time (several minutes) for an answer * operators not being able to speak English (I suppose this doesn't matter as people calling France would speak French anyway). >The list of countries and numbers for "Sverige Direkt" are as follows > New Zealand 000 946 >It is interesting to see the irregularity of the telephone numbers above, >which makes it almost impossible trying to remember them. In New Zealand the 0009 prefix is used for the international Direct-Dial service. The format is 0009 <country code> with the exception of USA & Canada who are 000911 and 000919 respectively. The 800 number system exists in New Zealand, so I'm not sure why Telecom didn't use an 800 number. Perhaps it is because they wanted to keep the direct-dial service separate from the national free-call system. I know that Telecom here give out cards that have a list of countries and the numbers that you can direct dial to New Zealand from. I think that most people would rather carry these when going overseas than trying to remember numbers. Anyway, most people don't go overseas too often. If they do it is often to the same country, so they shouldn't have problems remembering the direct dial number used in that country to call home. >As I can understand there are two reasons for this irregularity: >1. There is no generally used "800-number". Some similar numbers >are used in >2. The telephone numbers for each national "800-number" are allocated > locally, so it is not so probable that the same number can be used >An alternative solution that would make it possible to dial the same >number toll free anywhere in the world would be to introduce a pseudo >county number for toll free calls. The country code "800" seems to be >ideal for this purpose. There are still problems with such an idea. Many countries have adopted different standards. In New Zealand 800 numbers are only 6 digits (eg. 0800 123456), whereas in the States, I think there are 7 digits. And they are preceded with a 0 whereas other countries have different prefixes. New Zealand is moving towards a seven digit numbering system and cleaning up the strange numbering systems we have here, so I suppose eventually we will see Direct Dial numbers being the same throughout the world. pat cain; snarky@st1.vuw.ac.nz | | cs200cap@st1.vuw.ac.nz Voice +64 4 698330 | Modem +64 4 661231