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Toll-free telephone numbers in the North American Numbering Plan have the area code prefix 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877, and 888. Additionally, area codes 822, 880 through 887, and 889 are reserved for toll-free use in the future. 811 is excluded because it is a special dialing code in the group NXX for various other purposes.
A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefix similar to an area code. The specific service access varies by country.
Telephone exchange names were used in many countries, but were phased out in favor of numeric systems in the 1960s. In the United States, the demand for telephone service outpaced the scalability of the alphanumeric system and after introduction of area codes for direct-distance dialing, all-number calling became necessary.
However, the toll-free prefix 800 has been adopted widely elsewhere, including as the international toll-free country code. It is often preceded by a 0 rather than a 1 in many countries where 0 is the trunk prefix.
A form of toll-free telephone service in North America was the Zenith number, published in distant cities from where a company expected or desired frequent customer calls. Published as "Zenith" and a four- or five-digit number, these collect calls required operator assistance. The subscriber of the service was charged for the call. With "inward WATS", introduced for interstate calls by the ...
For public numbering systems, geographic location typically plays a role in the sequence of numbers assigned to each telephone subscriber. Many numbering plan administrators subdivide their territory of service into geographic regions designated by a prefix, often called an area code or city code, which is a set of digits forming the most-significant part of the dialing sequence to reach a ...
A telephone prefix is the first set of digits after the country, and area codes of a telephone number. In the North American Numbering Plan countries (country code 1), it is the first three digits of a seven-digit local phone number, the second three digits of the 3-3-4 scheme. In other countries, both the prefix and the number may have ...
Telephone number pooling, thousands-block number pooling, or just number pooling, is a method of allocating telephony numbering space of the North American Numbering Plan in the United States.