Premium-rate telephone number
telephone numbers for calls that are charged at a higher than normal rate
Premium-rate telephone numbers are telephone numbers that charge callers higher price rates for select services, including information and entertainment. A portion of the call fees is paid to the service provider, allowing premium calls to be an additional source of revenue for businesses. Tech support, psychic hotlines, and adult chat lines (e.g. dating and phone sex) are among the most popular kinds of premium-rate phone services. Other services include directory enquiries, weather forecasts, competitions and ratings televoting (especially relating to television shows). Some businesses, e.g. low-cost airlines, and diplomatic missions, such as the US Embassy in London or the UK Embassy in Washington, have also used premium-rate phone numbers for calls from the general public.
Premium calls are typically independent of the caller's area code. These telephone numbers are usually allocated based on a national telephone numbering plan that makes them easily distinguishable from non-premium numbers; telephone companies often offer their customers the option to block calls from these number ranges, and in some jurisdictions, are required by law to offer blocking services.
SMS (texting) also has a feature for premium rate services, however instead of standard telephone numbers, premium-rate texting uses so-called shortcodes, which are 4–6 digit numbers that work only for SMS.
Africa
Egypt
In Egypt, premium rate numbers begin with the prefix 0900, and for mobile services it uses short numbers to call or to send SMS to (4 digits only).
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This entry incorporates text from “Premium-rate telephone number” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.