NANPA's latest planning letter
The letter notes that the dialing plan in Sint Maarten will have four categories:
1) Local: 7D 2) Toll to rest of NANP: 1+10D 3) Operator-assisted: 0+10D 4) International Local: 7DThat final category is interesting -- calls to the French half of the island (Saint-Martin) can continue to be dialed as local calls, even though Saint-Martin is not part of the NANP and continues to use its own +590 country code! I don't know of any other part of the NANP that offers this kind of shortcut dialing to any non-NANP location, much less rating it as a local call. Decades ago, parts of Mexico used to be dialable from the US using two pseudo-NPA hacks (706 and 903, IIRC), but those were phased out and eventually assigned as regular area codes long ago, and all calls to Mexico thenceforth required standard +52 dialing. Does anybody know of any similar shortcuts in existence today? Are there any from the NANP half of the island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic) to the non-NANP half (+509 Haiti)?
There are no details on how Saint-Martin numbers will be mapped into 7 digits for callers from the Dutch half of the island. Saint-Martin numbers appear to be of the form +590 590-XXXXXX, +590 690-XXXXXX or +590
876-XXXXXX. Clearly, some scheme will have to transform those 9-digit local numbers into 7-digit numbers for purposes of dialing them locally from Sint Maarten. Does anyone have any further information on how that will work?Bob Goudreau Cary, NC