The 028 area can be accessed from the Republic of Ireland using either the domestic code 048, or the international prefix 00 44 28. Francis Blake invents a carbon transmitter similar to Edison's that saves the Bell company from extinction.

Gerken, Tom (12 December 2022). "December 2024 set as date for universal phone charger in EU". BBC News . Retrieved 4 March 2023. February 1876: Elisha Gray invents a liquid transmitter for use with a telephone, but he did not make one. While the transmission of speech by signal has a long history, the first devices that were wireless, mobile, and also capable of connecting to the standard telephone network are much more recent. The first such devices were barely portable compared to today's compact hand-held devices, and their use was clumsy. July 1874: Alexander Graham Bell conceives the theoretical concept for the telephone while vacationing at his parents' farm near Brantford, Canada. Alexander Melville Bell records notes of his son's conversation in his personal journal. Broad Manufacturer Agreement Gives Universal Phone Cable Green Light". Open Mobile Terminal Platform (Press release). 17 September 2007. Archived from the original on 29 June 2009 . Retrieved 26 November 2007.Meeting the challenge of the universal charge standard in mobile phones". Planet Analog. Archived from the original on 9 September 2012 . Retrieved 22 June 2010. November 1951: direct distance dialing (DDD) first offered on trial basis at Englewood, New Jersey, to 11 selected major cities across the United States; this service grew rapidly across major cities during the 1950s June 1878: The Telephone Company (Bell's Patents) Ltd. is registered in London. Opened in London on 21 August 1879, it is Europe's first telephone exchange, followed a couple of weeks later by one in Manchester. [14] The existing director areas were allocated a short area code, usually in the form 0x1 (01 for London). These were:

In addition, lower and higher rate non-geographic numbers (previously called lo-call or local-rate and national-rate numbers, though these terms are no longer recommended to be used as they can be misleading) [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] migrated to 08xx and premium rate numbers m January 1915: First transcontinental telephone call (3600 miles), with Thomas Augustus Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco receiving a call from Alexander Graham Bell at 15 Dey Street in New York City, facilitated by a newly invented vacuum tube amplifier. [27] John Lossing, Woodrow Wilson. Harpers' Encyclopædia Of United States From 458 A. D. To 1905, Harper & Brothers, 1905. Original from Pennsylvania State University, Digitized: 25 June 2009.Lam, Crystal; Liu, Harry (22 October 2007). "How to conform to China's new mobile phone interface standards". EE Times . Retrieved 22 June 2010. is the next version of cellular mobile telephone standards. The 5G standards include millimetre-band radio spectrum to allow data speeds up to 1 gigabit per second, and reduce latency (the processing time to handle a data transmission) between handset and network to a few milliseconds. 5G standards also include low-band and mid-band spectrum similar to existing networks. Telephone companies are introducing 5G technology starting in 2019. West Germany had a network called A-Netz launched in 1952 as the country's first public commercial mobile phone network. In 1972 this was displaced by B-Netz which connected calls automatically. Phil Porter, a Bell Labs engineer, proposed that cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas pointing in 3 directions. After the migration of geographic 0xxx area codes to new 01xxx codes on PhONEday (also 0xx → 01xx and 0xxxx → 01xxxx of course), some of the old area codes had started to be re-used for other purposes. For example, 0870 (Isle of Benbecula, Outer Hebrides) had been moved to 01870 and now 0870 started to be re-used for non-geographic services. Oftel had to issue a warning to operators to remove their "this number has changed, please redial inserting a one after the initial zero" messages that had been applied on PhONEday [55] so that callers could get through to the new non-geographic numbers.

The use of alphabetic exchange (area) codes was abandoned in the UK in 1966 in favour of all figure numbering. Nevertheless, about 60% of current area codes are still based on the original alphabetic STD codes. Coe, Lewis (1995), The Telephone and Its Several Inventors: A History, North Carolina: McFarland, 1995. ISBN 0-7864-0138-9February 1880: The photophone, also called a radiophone, is invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter at Bell's Volta Laboratory. [18] [19] The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light.