The Big Number Change was an update of telephone dialling codes in the UK in response to the rapid late-1990s growth of telecommunications and impending exhaustion of numbers. The change greatly expanded the pool of available numbers while helping to retain 'local dialling' (the ability to dial local numbers directly, without needing to dial an area code first). The change affected the dialling codes assigned to Cardiff, Coventry, London, Northern Ireland, Portsmouth and Southampton, culminating in a large switch on 22 April 2000. In addition to new area/city codes for many parts of the UK, the switch was also coupled with a move to eight-digit local numbers, the adjustment of all mobile phone numbers in the UK to the 07 prefix and the alteration of many non-geographic codes to the new 08 range.
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Famous quotes containing the words big, number and/or change:
“I’ve tried to open the door. My knock isn’t that big a sound. But it is like the knock in “The Wizard of Oz.” It set up this echo through the halls until it was heard by everyone.”
—Shannon Faulkner (b. c. 1975)
“Take away from the courts, if it could be taken away, the power to issue injunctions in labor disputes, and it would create a privileged class among the laborers and save the lawless among their number from a most needful remedy available to all men for the protection of their business interests against unlawful invasion.... The secondary boycott is an instrument of tyranny, and ought not to be made legitimate.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“[The boss] asked me if I was not interested in a change in my life. I answered that one can never change lives, that in any case all lives were the same, and that I was not at all unhappy with mine.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)