Firstly, toll-free or freephone numbers are used by organizations who wish to use non-charged calling services. They exist in the form of two main numbers beginning with 0800 and 0808. They carry with them no access charge or service charge on both mobile and landline.
It might seem strange, but toll-free phone numbers are not necessarily free to call from outside the country because of international costs and often they can’t be called at all from abroad. This is because they are not designed to be toll-free outside the UK. In order to ensure the lines are free of charge, some companies decide to block international calls. In addition, some local carriers don’t even route calls to a toll-free number beyond their borders. This makes some 0800 or 0808 prefixed numbers usually unreachable from overseas, so yes, Losali is very helpful in this situation. International freephone numbers don't in normal cases offer a solution because not many companies can afford the high costs to subscribe to this service, so are unusable in these instances.
They were introduced in the UK in 1985 firstly with the 0800 number and it was in 1997 that the 0808 prefix was added. Going even further back in time there was a manual toll-free service which was started by the Post Office in the UK in 1960, before the automated systems. Yes, they’ve been around for that long. Though the technicalities of how they worked are very different, they operated similarly in the sense that they reversed caller costs, so the call would be free. However it was only since 2015 that Ofcom have made numbers beginning with the prefixes 0800 and 0808 completely free to call from mobiles as well as landlines, without exception. Before 2015 when all 0800 and 0808 numbers became free, many providers were charging for calls to these numbers or even blocking them altogether and in the past 0345, 0645, 0500 prefixes shared the title as free-phones.
