They have now removed the 0300 numbers just leaving the 01/02 geographical ones.

NGMsGhost wrote on Feb 12^th, 2014 at 8:06pm:

I'm not sure what more Ofcom could do to educate the public as history shows they won't take a blind bit of notice. At the time of the Big Number change, all official publicity (and there was a heck of a lot of it) explained exactly how it was going to work and that the code for London (for instance) was 020 with eight-digit local numbers, but over 90% of the public and media and probably well over 50% of businesses (including sign-writers!) took not a blind bit of notice.

CJT-80 wrote on Feb 13^th, 2014 at 5:00pm:


You have to think of the public as being like a small child and whether Ofcom's actions on numbering could be understood by a small child from simple common sense principles.  This is because at least 50% of the public don't have mathematical ability or numeric intelligence any higher than that of a small child.

It was Ofcom and its predecessor that confused the public by moving from an easy to understand single 01 code to 0171 and 0181 and then trying to reverse it within a few years by moving back to a single 020 code with 8 digit numbers.  It is simply incomprehensible as to why the regulators did not stick with a single area code and add more digits to it to provide more numbers.

And when the regulators made the change back they never did any heavy advertising (of the kind that did happened with the switch from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency) to explain to the public that we were going back to the 01 era but with 01 now called 020 and all phone numbers being 8 digits instead of 7.  It could have been explained, the regulator never tried.

Similarly 0845 and 0870 at one stage just after introduction were charged to customers at the same rate as old Local and National Rate BT calls in the era before call plans and cheap competitor services became prevalent.  But when the telecoms industry then came up with the need for more NGNs with no pretensions at all of any linkage to local rate or national rate they were allowed to call them 0844 and 0871 and not forced to put them on 09 where they belong or at least on an unused range like 06.  Is it any wonder then that the majority of the public with child like lQs confuse them as being Local Rate and National Rate.

To be honest I don't actually understand why telephone numbers have remained at all as it would surely be easier to have replaced them by now with word names like an email address and for this to be portable and to follow the user if everything moved on to Voip.   And the notion of charging for phone calls should then have fallen away and they should simply have been part of your monthly broadband data allowance.

But anyhow leaving aside that phone numbers have remained Ofcom and predecessors could have educated people but they should have never had the 0171/0181 step on London numbers on the way to 020 and they should never have allowed the creation of further covert premium rate numbers on 0841-0844 or 0871-0873 or whatever it actually is.

The numbering plan has to be kept simple and logical in order for people to be able to understand it.  Unfortunately it isn't due to deliberate mismanagement by the regulator in bed with the telcos and so it by design is not the least bit easy or logical to understand.  That is why the public don't understand.  The public do understand simple things that have been deliberately designed to be able to be understood by even someone with a child like IQ.