Study on the Public Numbering Space
By the mid 1990s, the Spanish public telephone numbering space was reaching the exhaustion point in severla provinces, and additionally it could not support neither the entering into the market of new operators -that would demand their own numbering ranges- nor the introduction of new service such as mobile telephony -appearing by then-. Therefore, the Dirección General de Telecomunicaciones (the Spanish telecommunications administration) commissioned a study on the possible evolution models for the public numbering space. This study looked into:
- The description of the key aspects to consider when planning a new numbering scheme (routing, addressing, tarification, etc.)
- The description of the specific requirements of each network type (fixed network, mobile network, intelligent network, data network, etc.)
- The analysis of international initiatives on evolving the public numbering space (the cases of United Kingdom, Germany, Finland, France, the United States of America and Japan were taken into consideration)
- The analysis of the existing numbering state in Spain, in terms of service allocation, numbering exhaustion and numbering management
- The identification and analysis of evolution alternatives for the numbering of public telecommunication services
- Conclusions and recommendations
The result of the study were a number of recommendations, whose main impacts were the disappearance of the interprovincial telephone prefixes and the instauration of nine digits numbering for all fixed and mobile telephony services in Spain, that entered into operation in 1998.