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From: bcsaic!carroll@beaver.cs.washington.edu (Jeff Carroll)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: A Zero Length Phone Number!
Message-ID: <14872@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 21 Nov 90 06:21:15 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 837, Message 9 of 9


In article <14511@accuvax.nwu.edu> fisher@minster.york.ac.uk writes:

>A pedant could claim that the Vatican City State has even shorter
>telephone numbers - viz. zero digits long.  The country code is +39
>66982, and the "country" has only one telephone number, which is: .

	I've been to St. Peter's (just last summer, in fact), and
although I don't explicitly remember, I refuse to believe that there's
only one phone in the whole place. What am I failing to understand?


Jeff Carroll
carroll@atc.boeing.com


[Moderator's Note: It is not as though there 'is only one phone in the
whole place'. What we have here is a situation where an institution,
i.e. the Vatican, has a main listed telephone number on the Rome,
Italy phone exchange. Due to the politics involved, the Vatican is
considered a separate country, or nation; a place independent of Rome.
They are not independent of the local telco, except on paper! So their
phone number (the main listed one) becomes simultaneously their
country and city code, in order to standardize the Vatican with every
other 'country' in the world. They have a PBX-style system with
operators on duty to handle the traffic arriving at their combination
phone number/country-city code. They have many, many actual phone
instruments connected to their internal PBX.  PAT]