Universal Personal Telecommunications - The UPT Service

The UPT Service

A UPT phone number is intended to be an internationally consistent number which an individual can acquire, which can then be used for contacting them via telephone or other services. A UPT provider basically must have the ability to receive connections from the international telephone network, and then forward the called number to the individual's real number. This would have a similar effect to toll free numbers in not having a geographic connection to particular ranges of numbers, yet a UPT call would still incur a charge.

The first provider to be allocated UPT numbers was VISIONng, an international association. They were allocated a range within the +878 country code. The delegation of +87810 was requested by VISIONng chairman Herwart Wermescher and was confirmed by Counsellor, SG2 of ITU-TSB Richard Hill on May 21, 2002. As of 2007, the company's Sentiro website allowed individuals to rent UPT numbers for £12 a year with a one-off registration fee of £10 (excl. VAT). The service also included an experimental telephone number mapping ("ENUM") service.

In October 2007 some 700,000 users of the now-defunct VoIP service FWD were provisioned with global country code +87810. FWD’ers could be contacted from all VoIP ENUM enabled networks, without the callers having to find and add a prefix. They had to dial +878101393 followed by a six-digit FWD subscriber number.