11-digit phone numbers to be cut

According to Nguyen Duc Trung, Director of the Telecommunications Authority under the Ministry of Information and Communications, the change to fixed telephone area codes was completed nationwide on August 31.

After completing the change to fixed phone area codes, there are some surplus codes such as 03, 04, 05, 07 and 08 which will be used for the growth in mobile phone subscriptions, the authority said.

Accordingly, all 11-digit numbers with prefixes ‘012’ of VinaPhone and MobiFone, ‘016’ of Viettel, ‘018’ of Vietnamobile and ‘019’ of GMobile will be converted into 10-digit ones.

The last seven numbers of the 11-digit mobile phone numbers will remain the same, except for the prefixes ‘0166’, ‘0188’, ‘0199’, which will be changed.

Existing 10-digit mobile phone numbers beginning with 090, 091, 092, 093, 094, 099, 098, 097, 096 will not be affected.

To minimise the impact on users during the conversion process, the service provider must give at least 60 days notice about the change to subscribers through mass media. They must also allow normal calls to the old numbers as well as new ones for 60 days, it said.

In 2007, when the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (now the Ministry of Information and Communications) officially issued 11-digit number for mobile networks, public expressed their concern that these numbers were often used for advertising and marketing, and usually abandoned after a short period of time. Many people use the mobile phone numbers to spread spam and anonymous messages. As a result, many people were not happy with the use of 11-digit SIM cards.

In the first half of this year, the ministry de-activated and recalled more than 20 million unregistered SIM cards, most of them were 11-digit ones in preparation for the digital reserve’s planning.