European Telephony Numbering Space

Geographically the +388 "country" code was an overlay on top of all the pre-existing, state-bounded country codes of the countries in Europe. Among "special" country codes, +388 was unique in that it was both supranational yet geographically bounded (other special codes, such as +881 and freephone +800, are completely international). Instead of being subdivided geographically as in a typical numbering plan, the ETNS was intended to be subdivided by type of service or customer. It would therefore not have been possible to reverse engineer the location of an owner of an ETNS number based on the characteristics of the phone number. The numbers were also not allocated in blocks to individual carrier companies and were therefore intended to be portable. Carriers needed to have ETNS translation capability, or routing agreement with a carrier that did, in order for its customers to successfully call ETNS numbers. ==Subdivision==

Country Groups Specifically, ETNS was intended to be only one of a potentially larger set of European "country groups" participating in a shared regional overlay numbering plan. The only country group that comprised the ETNS was given an identification code of 3, which came after the +388 country code. Services After the country group identification code, the number space was divided according to service, indicated by a European Service Identity code. The table lists the service designations (country code, identification code, and ESI code) available under ETNS: European Service Identity codes • Public service application: 3883 1 • Customer service application: 3883 3 • Corporate networks: 3883 5 • Personal numbering: 3883 7 == See also==