We all know that non-geographic numbers route to at least one underlying geographic number. In order to receive calls via NEG's 0844 number, a GP practice needs to rent normal telephone lines from a physical network provider such as BT. These physical lines installed in the practice's building will have at least one geographic telephone number. Because the practice rents these physical telephone lines, they must know the telephone number(s). The number appears on their phone bill and they would have had to supply the number(s) to NEG in order to set up the 0844 number.

Are these assumptions correct? If so, I don't believe any GP practice can truthfully deny under the FOI Act that they know their underlying geographic phone number.

Yes this would normally be the case.But perhaps NEG pick up the Tab for the geographical number and have the bill sent direct to them,and dont tell the Surgery the geo number.Its the sort of stroke they would play.

The issue of whether every NGN always has an associated GN to which it is routed, and which may or may not be dialled as an accessible GN has been discussed in detail in at least one other thread

And the answer is NO! NGNs do not now always have an accessible GN which may be dialled.

wrote on Jun 26^th, 2005 at 3:50pm:

And the answer is NO! NGNs do not now always have an accesible GN which may be dialled.

dorf, I think you may have misunderstood the question.

The question was do surgeries know their geo no? and not, do they always have a geo no?

The point you make that some NGNs don't have to have a geographical alternative is a valid one. Some go to VoIP (voice over IP) lines. Basically, that means they connect using the internet.

Dave,

I believe that if a surgery does not have an assigned GN number it also will not know what it is? Or am I missing something here?

wrote on Jun 27^th, 2005 at 5:42pm:

I believe that if a surgery does not have an assigned GN number it also will not know what it is? ...

That would stand to reason, but they may have a geographical number and not know what it is. Is it possible for companies such as NEG to supply BT lines as part of their 'service'? We know that these systems can queue callers, so I presume that this queuing is done on the NGN.

If a geographical number exists, it may be only for incoming calls only.  :-/

Dave, it is not possible to execute queuing with a local system of any sort on a single line ("as the NGN"), but queueing may be done at the exchange and then routed to a single line, which probably is unknown to the GP as a GN and may not be dialled directly as a GN. Otherwise any entity including a GP must have n lines in to undertake queueing with a local system.

I can now answer my own question.  See this thread on the geographic requests forum:

http://www.saynoto0870.com/cgi-bin/forum/YaBB.cgi?board=test;action=display;num=1119970668

It seems that NEG supply the lines to the GP practices.