In the United States, both inter-exchange carriers (IXCs) and Local Exchange Carriers (LECs) offer toll free (800 number) services to their customers.
Unlike the format of telephone numbers which are geographic in nature, the format of the toll-free numbers is non-geographic. With the introduction of cell phones (in the year 1985) and internet phone services (in the year 2002), your house can have any area code in the United States. However, it will be considered geographic, as the calls from that area code will be termed as local calls where the recipient can be physically located anywhere else. In the above mentioned scenario, it becomes feasible to track the proper location of the caller from the dial code (e.g. LA or Manchester). However, unlike telephone numbers, toll free numbers can be physically located anywhere in the world.
When a toll free number is dialed, the telephone operator needs to track down the actual physical location of the call. This is the first most important task a telephone operator needs to perform. To achieve this task, an operator is helped by the intelligent network capabilities that are embedded into the network.
To simply things further, the dialed toll-free 800 number is converted into a normal geographic number. Once it is converted into a normal geographic number, it is then routed to the telephone exchange in the normal way in the same manner as other geographic numbers are. Depending upon the case in hand, special routing methods can be applied if required. For example: Time of Day routing.
Note: The fact is that service provider don’t charge the caller for calls made to any series of 800 numbers. The charge is recovered from the recipients of these calls, billed by some other method. People often get confused between Toll-free 800 numbers and series if 900-numbers, for which the service provider charges the caller at rates far more than long-distance service rates.
