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A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefix similar to an area code. The specific service access varies by country.
When a customer decides to use toll-free service, they assign a Responsible Organization (RespOrg) to own and maintain that number. The RespOrg can be either the IXC that is going to deliver the majority of the toll-free services or an independent RespOrg. [6] When a toll-free number is dialed, each digit is analyzed and processed by the LEC.
By the 1980s, computerisation of the system allowed British Telecom "Linkline" 0800 freephone numbers and AT&T +1-800- toll-free numbers to be controlled by a database and terminated virtually anywhere with each inbound call itemised and billed individually. This smart network was further refined to provide toll-free number portability in the ...
Modern toll-free telephone numbers, which generate itemized billing of all calls received instead of relying on the special fixed-rate trunks of the Bell System's original Inward WATS service, depend on ANI to track inbound calls to numbers in special area codes such as +1-800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, and 833 with 822 reserved for future toll free use (United States and Canada), 1800 ...
The 555 exchange is not reserved in area codes used for toll-free phone numbers. This led to the video game The Last of Us accidentally including the number to a phone-sex operator. [9] The number "555-2368" (or 311-555-2368) is a carryover from the "EXchange 2368" ("Exchange CENTral") number common in telephone advertisements as early as the ...
However, the toll-free prefix 800 has been adopted widely elsewhere, including as the international toll-free country code. It is often preceded by a 0 rather than a 1 in many countries where 0 is the trunk prefix.
A toll-free number was merely an index into a large, distributed database; any number could be reassigned geographically anywhere by changing its database record. A call could be routed to one of multiple locations based on the call origin, load balancing between multiple call centers, times, or days.
With "inward WATS", introduced for interstate calls by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1967, subscribers were issued a toll-free telephone number in a designated toll-free area code. Unlike a standard collect call or a call to a Zenith number, 1‑800 normally may be dialed directly with no live operator. Callers within a ...