Believe it or not, but Non-geographic numbers or NGN’s make up the biggest group of numbers on the UK Numbering Plan. This also means that most number prefixes in the UK are difficult to contact from abroad, but that’s a problem that no longer needs to get you down. Below we have summed up what exactly Non-geographic numbers are, who uses them, how calls are made and why they often can’t be called from overseas.
Below we’ve broken down the groups of Non-geographic numbers:
03 numbers, 0300 or 0303- These are usually helpline or public sector numbers. Most of the time they’re held by Non-profit associations. The phone line charges fund maintenance and salary payment for the called party. They can’t do revenue sharing.
0800 or 0808 numbers- These are toll free or freephone numbers. Most of the time commercial businesses use them. They cannot do revenue sharing.
0845, 0870 or 09 numbers- These are Premium rate numbers. It’s most common for Phone-paid services or businesses that depend on phone-line revenue to own them
070 or 076 numbers- These are follow-me service numbers. Mostly small businesses or personal traders use them. They use the numbers for diverting calls from private numbers to a trading/commercial/promotional number and keep their personal number private. Most of the time they are used only once.
Most of the time these numbers cannot be called from overseas, but Losali is a useful tool to connect to parties you intend to reach.
International telephone carrier companies such as BT in the UK, Telefónica in Spain, and Deutsche Telekom in Germany all sign an agreement about what type of traffic they will allow to go through them. These are quite technical contracts called telecoms interconnect agreements and the agreement covers the connection between geographical numbers for the countries that are part of the agreement. This of course means that non-geographic numbers can tend to be left out from the Telecoms interconnect agreements, so if the number you are calling is a non-geographic number and is a non-personal number it isn’t necessarily guaranteed to be possible to call your country from abroad. If that’s the case, use Losali and that problem suddenly vanishes.
