Hello, perhaps you can help:
> My family are now at a cottage in a village outside Moscow, where they
> are staying for weeks due to the hot weather. The telephone number
> there contains less than the usual number of digits (6 instead of
> seven). For some reasons calls cannot get there from North America,
> although they can call here. The problem seems to be with the US, as
> I don't even get a Russian dial tone, but a North American one
> followed by an English-language message saying that there is no such
> number and to try again.
> Is there any trick to dialing such numbers and getting through? There
> is freakish discrepency between the cost of calling from there (a
> couple of dollars per minute) versus from here (cents per minute with
> calling card), so I would prefer to be the one doing the calling.
Read here:
formatting link
and maybe you will find some answers. Numbers aren't always a fixed length from city to city in certain countries, some people include numbers which need to be omitted when dialing international, and some places have numbering plan changes (which, that URL discusses). In London many places still have a number from an old numbering plan printed on their business sign/literature (i.e. 0171 became 0207) and if you didn't know about this change you could spend all day mis-dialing. Somtimes mobile phone numbers include more/less digits also.
Example of how an international number may be printed and how you might dial it differently depending on the originating area:
+44 (0)20 7555 5555 Dialed as: 011 44 20 7555 5555 (from the US) 020 7555 5555 (from the UK) 00 44 20 7555 5555 (from Germany)So, as you can see, the 0 is only used when dialing locally from within the UK and international dialing prefix in the US is 011 vs. 00 in most European (and many other) countries.