Many organisations use non-geographic numbers not to gain additional revenue, but because they regularly need to change their destination routing, for example if they have call centres in multiple locations. This is particularly true of organisations using 0845 numbers, which generate the lowest revenue share of all the 084 and 087 prefixes. I do not see an end to the proliferation of revenue-generating NGNs until a new NGN is introduced that costs all callers the same as a GN and for which the organisation receiving the call is not required to pay a per-minute charge. I'm not sure whether the financials of a NGN could ever allow both zero surcharge to the caller and zero per-minute charge to the call recipient, except perhaps for the forthcoming 056 prefix for VOIP. However, despite what BT may currently say in their price list, we have yet to see whether 056 will in practice be charged as a geographic call by the majority of telcos.

Without the call recipient using VOIP, is there any way that a non-surcharged NGN could exist? The financials would need to be such that all telcos (including the likes of 18866) could charge the prefix as a geographic call.