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In the early 1980s, Bell Labs received a patent for what became AT&T's "Advanced 800 Service", a computer-controlled system where any toll-free number could point to any destination number, such as to a small business local number instead of a special InWATS line, and an itemized bill generated only for the calls the business actually received.
An automatic number announcement circuit (ANAC) is a component of a central office of a telephone company that provides a service to installation and service technicians to determine the telephone number of a telephone line. The facility has a telephone number that may be called to listen to an automatic announcement that includes the caller's ...
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By the 1980s, computerisation of the system allowed British Telecom "Linkline" 0800 freephone numbers and AT&T +1-800- toll-free numbers to be controlled by a database and terminated virtually anywhere with each inbound call itemised and billed individually. This smart network was further refined to provide toll-free number portability in the ...
[4] [5] In practice, some RespOrgs do abuse the system by stockpiling millions of toll-free numbers for advertising purposes, because the enforcement of the regulations has been weak and sporadic. This situation has led to periodic creation of overlay plan toll-free area codes to prevent exhaustion of the SMS/800 available number pool.
With "inward WATS", introduced for interstate calls by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1967, subscribers were issued a toll-free telephone number in a designated toll-free area code. Unlike a standard collect call or a call to a Zenith number, 1‑800 normally may be dialed directly with no live operator. Callers within a ...
The American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) first introduced 800 toll-free service in 1967. [2] When AT&T was the only Interexchange carrier, local exchange carriers automatically routed all toll-free calls directly to an AT&T point of presence without performing a translation from the toll-free number to the terminating telephone number. [3]
The system was redesigned in 1981 to use a database, the SMS/800 service management system, which could direct any toll-free number to any destination based on various conditions; number prefixes remained tied to specific carriers until a RespOrg (responsible organization) structure was introduced in 1993 (US) and 1994 (Canada) to allow ...