Specially to reasonably distribute international phone numbers to different countries and areas of the whole world as well as between cell phone operators the telephone numbering plan is used. But international calling codes are not really the same as numbering plans. In places like Australia or North America there figures a closed numbering plan which involves special length territory codes and telephone numbers.

Some countries haven’t yet standardized the length of calling codes and subscriber’s phone numbers so in these countries the open numbering plan is popular. All numbers defined by this plan are dialed variously. You should know which digits are to be anyway dialed (these digits complete the subscriber’s number) and which can be omitted (area dialling codes).
And now the numbering plans as well as international calling codes differ from land to land despite that the International Telecommunication Union or ITU makes frequent tries to arrange the system. Firstly the Union offered the different countries to use 00 as the international access combination. Even though it was entered by several countries the rest of the countries like USA, Canada and different countries of the North American Numbering Plan desided not to forget the present dialling codes. Mixed up? Give a try to our brand reverse phone look up!

Country codes (the codes that stand for nations or set of nations) are established by the international numbering plan. In order to regulate the codes for international calls there is the E.164 rule set. It points the general size of the dialled number. Anyway in each region the phone numbers are fixed in a different way according to the country’s standards. District country codes then may be with:

- A fixed extension, complete of for example one unit in Australia or 3 in Canada and the USA.
- The size that is not set so that it varies from 1 up to 2 in Peru, from one up to five on japanese isles or from two up to five in Austria or Germany or otherwise.

- The standards of long numbers that simply contain the dialling code. They use it e.g. in Norway and Spain. In this case the closed numbering plan is used. It happens that interurban area calling codes are applied in countries like Belgium and Italy, the Netherlands or Switzerland, african countries or others. And usually for this purpose 0 is used.

Naturally the price of the call is mainly defined by the dialing code. The rate for calls within an area dialling code mainly turns less expensive than for the calls to the telephone numbers with some other area calling code. The calls to the numbers of neighboring calling codes are also charged at smaller rate.

But as in the USA the rates for home calls are set by the state norms while long-distance calls are evaluated by competition, it turns so that local calls have to be less cheap.

As it happens that in the USA the distance between the subscribers of one large area may be too big, the calls are evaluated considering the interval though the dialing code is the same.

The rates are usually determined for territory sections which are around zero-six, six-twelve miles and etc. Generally they are assigned by valuation centers. But as the home call services went to be deregulated things became different.

Now it’s becoming popular among the people to use the so-called “all-you-can-eat” plan (a fixed rate of about thirty dollars per month as actual for this spring giving an opportunity to call to any place of States).
In a number of areas cell phone systems apply peculiar dialling codes. As well they are applied for some exceptional rates, free or premium accounts.

There also may be various special variants. For example in countries like Egypt area calling codes define nothing because the costs stay similar for the whole country and in the UK the area calling code is made of two segments each with its cost.