Someone rang yesterday from about half a mile away. Their number's in my phone's memory, but it displayed as "44208747****" instead of their name as it usually would. Called 1471 and the system reported that the last number to call was "0044208747****".

Why does a local call get identified as if it's an international call?

Would it be a company or a domestic number?

If it is a company number they may well have a switchboard that allows them to program in any old number as the CLI. So someone could have programmed the number in international dial format.

Only other possibility I can think of is that you and the caller are on different service providers and for some reason your provider regards the callers one as "foreign". Either of you on VOIP for instance?

Dunno - I'm not on VOIP, don't know if they are but their number always used to trigger my phone to display their name. I'm on BT, so it's BT that is identifying it as "0044 etc" and recording that as the number for 1471 to play out, isn't it? So why wouldn't BT recognise an "004420... " number as a London number?
Last edited by Inkblot : 08-06-2006 at 13:24

The number that you see displayed on your phone can actually be any old number the person calling you wants it to be. Obviously a normal domestic user doesn't have access to the BT exchange to program up the number so BT fill the CLI field with the phone number of the line. In which case it would be a bog standard 02xxx number for London.

However on a private switchboard you can very often program it to send any number you like. I can do that for the phone sat next to me very simply. So I could get it to send 123456789 if I so wished and that is what you would see on your phone and what 1471 would read back to you. A more legitimate use for this would be for all phones in a sales group, for example, to send an 0870 number rather than the real direct dial number when cold calling you in the middle of your dinner

So it isn't necessarily BT identifying it as 0044 etc. It could be a private switchboard that has been configured to send international dial format numbers for whatever reason or a non-BT provider who programs their CLI with international format numbers.

BT will send this CLI field unaltered to your phone and store it in the 1471 service. They don't, to the best of my knowledge, do anything clever with it. Bar remove it altogether if you dial the 141 prefix of course. So if someone chooses to send CLI in the format 0044xxxx then that is precisely what you will see.

So - hypothetically - it could be that the person who called has somehow arranged for their home phone to send their full international number? I can see why they might want to do that, because they have lived in several other countries and probably have lots of contacts overseas - but would the "0044" number be displayed if they phoned someone in another country?

It all depends on whether the data burst that gets sent down the phone line containing the CLI gets through the various different telephone systems in use around the world. Plus of course sending 0044 isn't really much use if the country they are dialling doesn't use 00 as the international access prefix!

That's why you very often see UK numbers formatted as +44xxxx the + is a kind of wildcard for "use the international dial prefix". For instance if you program UK numbers in your mobile phone memories with +44 instead of the leading 0 you can dial them from anywhere in the world, without needing to remember what prefix you need to get international access.

The other way it can happen is via an indirect provider (like one of the Finarea entities) - sometimes they generate CLI as 0044xxxxxxxx, sometimes as +44xxxxxxxxx, sometimes as 0xxxxxxxx and sometimes not at all

Yes. 1899 does nearly all the time during the week.

It's probably because they route their calls out of the country and back in again and so the CLI is displayed in international format.

Yes, a relitive of mine uses my 1899 account, and when they called the other day it was in format of 004419XXX.... But had last digit missing

Yeah, 1899, 18866, 18185 and their VoIP services often route calls outside the UK and back in again as it's cheaper.

This means mostly when calling a BT landline it will display as "International" even if the person is calling from next door, as the CLI is often flagged as "0044......." or "44....." BT annoyingly most the time change this to "International" if it can't be 100% sure the of the source / the number is genuine.

Occasionally BT allows the number to be displayed, and why sometimes when you get calls from the USA, France, Germany, Spain etc the number is displayed.

You don't get any of this problem with mobile phones, when they see the number as +44 or 0044 it recognises you are in the UK and formats the number correctly and will also display international numbers.

This is why I've said on other threads, if a call comes up as "International" on your landline then you shouldn't just ignore it, as it could be friends, family, important business calling, but have chosen to use 1899.

Who wouldn't use 1899 when they only charge 3 pence per call anytime of the day.

I dumped my landline last year and just use VoIP, the great thing about VoIP other than loads of free services, such as call waiting, ACR, 3-way calling and caller display is that it will display all international callers numbers if not withheld and not just mask them as International as BT mostly do.

It is only a tiny %-age of calls I receive that aren't routed via 1899 or one of their sister companies.