Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: johns@happy.uk.sun.com (John Slater) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Translating Alpha Phone Numbers Message-ID: <8675@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 4 Jun 90 12:46:39 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: John Slater Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 63 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 414, Message 4 of 10 You may be interested to learn that the association of letters with telephone digits works slightly differently in the UK. First of all the assignment itself is different : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ABC DEF GHI JKL MN PRS TUV WXY OQ The main difference from the American method is that O is assigned to 0 rather then 6. Also Q is assigned to 0. We too have no Z. The other difference is that all this is ancient history! British Telecom (or the GPO as it was then) changed to "all-figure dialling" in the 1960's. Occasionally I see an old dial with the letters on as described above, but they are now very rare. The letters were used for STD codes (see below), and previously for dialling other exchanges within cities. For example, a number in the Mayfair district of London would be written as MAYfair 1234 - one of the Mayfair exchanges is still 629. I was interested to learn from the "coathanger" posting a while back that the same system was used in the US. Before "all-figure dialling", STD (subscriber trunk dialling, == long distance) codes were alphanumeric - e.g. Blackpool was 0BL3 (all UK STD codes start with zero, as in most parts of the world), whereas Blackburn was 0BL4. Today they are 0253 and 0254 respectively. The trailing digit was used simply to distinguish between codes for towns with similar initial letters, never as a third letter (except by chance). This scheme extends also to the original six large metropolitan districts which were allotted 3-digit STD codes and 7-digit numbers. Apart from London (01 until the recent split into 071/081), the codes are 021 *B*irmingham 031 *E*dinburgh 041 *G*lasgow 051 *L*iverpool 061 *M*anchester This was broken somewhat in the early 1980's by the introduction of 091 for the Newcastle/Sunderland/Durham area in the north-east. Dialling within this area is a real can of worms, but I'll save that for another posting. Because most of the STD codes were assigned back in the 1950's, it follows that, given an unknown STD code, one can make an intelligent guess as to where it is. E.g. I come from an area in the north-west with the code 0706. From the table, it can only be PO, RO or SO (ignoring Q!). In fact the town is called Rochdale. This system is not perfect, but it can help occasionally. It's amazing how much of this stuff comes back to you when you start thinking. All I was going to do was post the letter assignment table. If anybody is actually interested in this STD code stuff, let me know and I'll wrack my brains some more. And I'm just an amateur observer and user of telecom services, with a so-so memory, so there's no guarantee that this stuff is accurate. John Slater Sun Microsystems UK, Gatwick office