What Exactly Are UK 01 Numbers And 02 Numbers?

01 numbers and 02 numbers are United Kingdom telephone numbers that relate to a given place. They are also widely known as local area numbers, STD codes, and geographic numbers and each relates to a specific town, city or area in the United Kingdom. One example is 01722 that relates to the city of Salisbury in the South of England and 0131 which relates to the Scottish city of Edingburgh.02 numbers are very much the same and were introduced in the year 2000. There are now about 650 geographic area codes in operation.

It most likely comes as no surprise that the largest sized population covered by a geographic number is London (020), but the largest area covered by them is actually Northern Ireland (028). Countries outside of the UK utilizing the same system are jersey, Guernsey and also the Isle of Man. A few 01 numbers are reserved for the requirements of television drama and they’re purely fictitious in order to avoid a high volume of unwelcome phone calls.

01 and 02 numbers are issued to people when they set up a fixed landline. An area code will be fixed by where in the United kingdom the landline is, and the number following that will be exclusive to the landline.

Sometimes, geographic numbers are virtual. This means that someone in Salisbury (01722) can decide to purchase a telephone number relating to Edinburgh (0131) and have any phone calls to the Edinburgh number immediately re-routed to a telephone number of their choice, whether that be their Salisbury landline or a mobile phone. Because of this a business can seem to be local to one place when in fact it may not have any kind of physical presence there at all. This is advantageous to businesses when marketing themselves locally because the vast majority of people would prefer to deal with a nearby business and to phone a local telephone number.

Geographic phone numbers have undergone a few changes in recent times as a result of rising human population and increased use of technology. Phone calls used to go through the Operator at a telephone exchange, but Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) was introduced in 1958 to cut out the requirement for an operator to manually put a call through. Unique codes for each and every telephone exchange in the country were issued in a process that needed right up until 1979 to finish.

The aptly named PhONEday, occurred in 1995, and came about to allow the number “1″ to be inserted into all United kingdom geographic area codes, extending the range of numbers available. This meant that all geographic numbers now started with 01.

With even more population increase and the increase in second telephone lines, the demand from customers for phone numbers became impossible to keep up with and a new numbering system had to be developed, so in the year 2000, the “Big Number Change” came into force and 02x area codes could be used.

For an idea of how the geographic numbers have developed throughout the years, London started off as 01 in the 1960′s through to 1990, changed to 071 and 081 (for inner and outer London) from 1990-1995, evolved again to 0171 and 0181 from 1995-200, and it is now 020.
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