TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: A Question About International Country Code Number Assignments

Re: A Question About International Country Code Number Assignments

John Levine (johnl@iecc.com)
14 Jul 2005 10:29:02 -0000

> My question is about international phone-codes. I always wanted to
> know: why appointed regions have appointed phone-codes. I'm sure that
> it's sequence isn't accidental. What logic lies in this order of
> codes?

The codes are assigned by an office at the International
Telecommunications Union in Geneva. They do indeed try to assign
codes with some geographic logic, such as 5x for the Americas, 3x and
4x for Europe, and 2x for Africa, but sometimes there aren't any
available codes in the appropriate regions. Hence Greenland is 299
even though it's not in Africa, because there weren't any 3xx codes or
4xx available when Greenland wanted a code.

ITU recommendation E.164 describes country code allocation, and
somewhere on the ITU site is the list of country codes as a free
download.

R's,

John

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