International premium rate service (IPRS) refers to internationally available telephone-based premium services. It is analogous to "900" or "976" numbers in North America, which always incur a recipient-defined charge in excess of regular call charges. Internationally, this service has been allocated country code +979. IPRS numbers are known as UIPRNs.
The ITU recommendation for IPRS defines four charge categories, across which the +979 numbering space is divided:
| Range | Charge band | Designation |
|---|---|---|
| +979 1 | 1 | "High" |
| +979 3 | 2 | "Medium" |
| +979 5 | 3 | "Low" |
| +979 9 | Special | "Special" |
UIPRNs are only available to premium service providers who will provide their service to more than one country.
The format of the numbers will be 979 a bcdefghi, where the a digit, 1, 3, 5 or 9, will indicate the charging band, and the remaining digits will be the IPRS subscriber's number. 1, 3 and 5 indicate charge bands 1, 2 and 3, respectively, while 9 will indicate a special charge band.
The service is not yet known to be active. Once it is activated, it may not be available from every country, even though there is minimal or no cost to the receiving customer, as interchange rates would need to be negotiated for countries to allow origination of calls.
Famous quotes containing the words premium, rate and/or service:
“There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)