Call the World for Free With Universal International Freefone Service
by BitRobber (BitRobber@gmail.com)
This article is not another article teaching you how to use VoIP to make calls (with shitty quality!) to overseas for small fractions of pennies. Instead, it's an exploration of a neglected corner of the phone system. Interesting things often collect in dark corners.
I've tried to make this a concise summary of nearly everything I know about an unusual subject. As such, it will be dense.
You probably know that it's possible to dial international calls at a horrendously expensive rate right from the telephone in your home, or cheaply over a lousy connection using the Internet. Perhaps you've sighed at the expense, wishing that you were able to call overseas cheaply and without the hassle of VoIP. (Err... I know I have.) Your wait may be over.
In 1997, the International Telecommunications Union (www.itu.int) created a system called Universal International Freefone Numbers (UIFNs).
In a nutshell, they defined a non-geographic country code, +800, to which calls are toll-free from all of the participating nations.
UIFNs are of the format +800-XXXX-XXXX (to dial, replace + with 011 in the U.S., 00 in Europe, and so forth).
The actual phone line that your call will go to is at the discretion of the owner of the number, and can be any phone number in the entire world. They can contract with their carrier to have it route to different call centers depending on time of day, traffic load, and so forth.
Just like 1-800-NPA-XXXX numbers in the United States, these calls reverse bill. The recipient gets to pay through the nose while the caller (you!) gets a free call. A common rate structure for this service is a per minute incoming rate, on top of which there may be a charge per day or per month for having the number allocated and routable.
The benefit of a UIFN to a number holder is that they offer a uniform dialing format around the world. This is especially useful in Europe, where a corporation may do business in multiple countries with widely varying toll-free number schemes. They can save money with one set of business cards and advertisements.
Behind the Scenes
I'm going to address this from a United States-centric perspective, since that's the phone system I know the most about.
When you start by dialing 011, the phone switch flags that as an international call. It collects all the digits you dial, and then passes them on to your preferred long-distance carrier for routing and billing.
Your long-distance carrier then must look up the terminating carrier for the call. The ITU maintains the master list of terminating carriers for UIFNs , but this list isn't used to route calls. Instead, each originating carrier is supposed to maintain its own UIFN routing database. When it's figured out the terminating carrier, it hauls the call to a location where it peers with that terminating carrier, and hands it off to them.
This is different from standard international call routing, where the country and city code is translated to a physical network location, where the call is then handed to the preferred carrier (usually the cheapest).
Notably, it's also different from the United States' toll-free routing scheme, where the number you dial is translated, by a central database, into another 10-digit phone number and then routed normally.
Each originating carrier maintains its own database, as I said earlier.
Let's say I'm to request a UIFN from British Telecom, and I want to have it be reachable from Denmark and Sweden. I tell this to British Telecom, and they get a number from the ITU for me.
Then BT, as the terminating carrier, talks to all the Danish and Swedish international carriers (Tele2, TeliaSonera, Unisource, and TDC) to get them to add the UIFN to each of their databases as "routing via British Telecom." Each carrier must then place a test call to British Telecom to ensure the number routes properly.
Billing
No discussion of telephony would be complete without a section on how the billing is done. A phone company without a billing department just isn't a phone company.
That said, I don't know for certain how inter-carrier settlement occurs for calls made via UIFNs . I suspect that settlement agreements are negotiated pairwise between individual carriers, similar to how the calls themselves are routed. I haven't confirmed this, however.
Where Can I Expect to Use UIFNs?
UIFN dialing is little-known and patchily implemented in the United States.
Some landline switches will accept dialing of UIFN calls, and some will reject them before you're even done dialing. Whether the call actually completes is up to your long-distance carrier.
Sprint's, AT&T's, and MCI's long-distance operations all route UIFN calls properly, provided their routing databases contain the number. Qwest's doesn't, and I can't say for sure whether anyone else does either.
My Qwest 0 operator and her supervisor both denied the existence of country code 800. When I asked why my calls were going through, they were at a loss for words, and said to call the business office. The Sprint long distance rate-and-route operator, however, told me without hesitation that it's a free call that I can dial myself.
And dial I did.
No payphones that I've tried will let me dial UIFNs for free. The FCC requires payphone operators to allow users to call toll-free numbers for free. This doesn't apply to UIFNs . Payphones in my corner of Qwest-land (which are operated by FSH Communications) give a CBCAD recording, the same as when you dial any out-of-LATA numbers.
Out of the five cellular carriers I have access to (T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and Nextel), only Nextel and T-Mobile routed my calls properly. Notably, AT&T insisted on routing my calls to +800-ABCD-EFGH to +1 800-ABC-DEFG.
This surprised me, as I expect AT&T to have the least amount of pretend telephony in their network. Their long distance service, for example, is usually top-notch. Further proof that AT&T long distance is completely separate from AT&T Mobility.
Both of the T-Mobile customer-service people I talked to denied that country code 800 exists. A call will go through on T-Mobile, if you have international dialing allowed on your line. (T-Mobile uses AT&T long distance service, so this is sensible.)
If all this fails you, it's still possible to call UIFNs .
From nearly all landline phones in the United States, you can dial 101-0288-0# to get AT&T's operator platform. At the prompt, you can then dial 011-800-ABCD-EFGH and your call will go through. You oughtn't get billed for this call.
Other PICs (101-XXXX codes) that I've found to work are MCI's (101-0555, 101-0222, 101-0888), and Sprint's (101-0252, 101-0333, 101-0872). Some of these work only when you dial 101-XXXX-011-800-ABCD-EFGH, while others only work when you call using the operator or menu system, via 101-XXXX-0#.
You can't dial PICs from cellphones. Your final refuge here is the wide range of prepaid phone cards and operator service lines. Since these tend to be made of Asterisk and pretend telephony, I can't imagine that very many route +800 calls at all. The only one I have available is from Verizon. The card platform doesn't route it, and the card platform's operators refused to dial it for me.
I've mostly given up on trying to get operators to do their job properly. The nice man at AT&T's free 1-800-OPERATOR service let me call a UIFN once I told him that it didn't work from my cellular phone.
I've had so many arguments with operators in the past few months about whether 800 is a country code or an area code in the U.S., it's ridiculous. I try to make it clear that I want to dial country code 800. The operator then asks what country that is. I say it's international toll-free. Then the operator says either "But where does it go?" or "That phone number is too long, phone numbers are 7-digits." I've had moderate success simply saying that the number goes to Germany.
On top of all this hassle, most UIFN owners choose to not have them reachable from the United States. This may be because it's cheaper to simply get a +1-800 number in the United States and then forward it overseas, than it is to support customers who sometimes can't dial you and don't know why not. It's a horrible mess over here.
What Can I Do With UIFNs?
That's the $25 question.
As someone on the Internet said, "Hand-scanning is the pastime of bored phreakers everywhere." It's a bit of a pain, but there's no better way to find interesting things on the phone network than dialing a bunch of sequential numbers and listening carefully.
You can query the UIFN assignment database at www.itu.int/cgi-bin/htsh/uifn/search/uifn.form so that you don't waste your time scanning non-allocated phone numbers. Even then, most of the numbers that searches bring up won't complete from inside the United States.
Already, mining search engines for UIFNs , I've found at least a few conference bridges. Think of that - maybe you can get a whole IRC channel on a toll-free conference line, courtesy of some corporation you've never heard of.
It's also just fun to hear the circuits connecting sometimes.
Many UIFNs allocated by Deutsche Telekom are broken in interesting ways (e.g., +800-2255-3241 or +800-2255-5888). AT&T's worldwide business customer support hotline at +800-2255-4288 (800-CALL-4-ATT) lets you press 4 over and over to stack up international circuits. There are a bunch of other interesting things out there waiting to be found, and I've only explored the range +800-2255-XXXX in depth.
Resources
The ITU website, www.itu.int, is full of information and is hard to navigate.
If you want even more detail on how UIFNs get activated, the procedure is described on page 13 of E.152, which lives at www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-E.152-200605-I/en
The listing of UIFN providers, by country, is available at www.itu.int/cgi-bin/htsh/uifn/uifn.operator_contact I'm assuming that these are also the carriers of last resort.
The International Inbound Services Forum operates a database of carriers offering to receive international calls at www.iis-forum.com/factbook