EU may end all roaming charges

[tux]

Originally Posted by NFH

Vodafone UK has an even simpler version of this. You pay £3/day when you're roaming, and all your usage is charged as if you were in the UK, e.g. from your inclusive allowances. All that will happen for Vodafone customers when the EU imposes its ban on roaming charges is that the £3/day charge will disappear.

I hope so... There's also a rumour about an European telephone numbering plan. I wonder how they'll manage the diversity of prefixes and length of numbers throughout Europe...

[NFH]

Originally Posted by tux

I hope so... There's also a rumour about an European telephone numbering plan. I wonder how they'll manage the diversity of prefixes and length of numbers throughout Europe...

Would they have a +4 code for the whole of the EEA? They couldn't use +3 because there are several non-EEA European countries with +3 country codes.

See List of country calling codes - Wikipedia

[tux]

Originally Posted by NFH

Would they have a +4 code for the whole of the EEA? They couldn't use +3 because there are several non-EEA European countries with +3 country codes.

See List of country calling codes - Wikipedia

Long time ago the EU proposed this: Telephone numbers in the European Union - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But it's an awful proposal. Let's see what Neelie Kroes proposes in September

[ChrisNeedsToKnow]

Originally Posted by tux

Long time ago the EU proposed this: Telephone numbers in the European Union - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But it's an awful proposal. Let's see what Neelie Kroes proposes in September

Ouch! This proposal is really awful, especially because it keeps most of the legacy crap like country codes!

A system similar to the US might be sufficient, albeit it would probably be very hard to introduce?

+3 (or +4) = EU (+appendages like Switzerland, Liechtenstein etc..., just like the US´s +1-system accomodates Canada, Puerto Rico, Bahamas etc...)
3 digits determine the area (aaa)
7 further digits are individual extensions (eeeeeeee)

This way all EU (+appendages) #s could look like this:
+3-aaa-eeeeeee

1000 areas of 10 million numbers each, altogether 10 billion #s.

There are roughly 500m people in the proposed area, so that would leave ~20 numbers per person. If that´s not enough I don´t know. Especially since many crazy people (like me) who currently hoard multiple numbers wouldn´t have to do just that anymore.

[tux]

I'd appreciate a similar proposal, but it would imply the change of ALL the existing telephone numbers.

[ChrisNeedsToKnow]

Originally Posted by tux

I'd appreciate a similar proposal, but it would imply the change of ALL the existing telephone numbers.

Yes - but once done everything would become so much easier.

Also it might bring some sense back into numbering plans:

I´m originally from a town of 350.000 people (Bonn/Germany). When I learned what a phone is, numbers had 6 digits. That´s ~3 #s per individual.

Later this was increased to 7 digits. Granted - faxes and offices... Maybe 3 #s per person is a little tight, but 30 per person must be enough...

Nopes - new numbers were issued and now have 8 digits. That´s 100m #s (which could nearly accomodate all of China), or ~300 #s per individual. That´s just plain stoopid/unnecessary, or I´m getting above basic maths totally incorrect.