Telephone numbers in Costa Rica

Telephone numbers in Costa Rica

Country Code: 506

Prior to 1994, all phone numbers were 6-digit long, but due to increasing demand of lines the national electricity and telecommunications monopoly, Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, introduced a new system, in which the telephone numbers in every province were assigned a prefix as follows:

2 - San José and Heredia 4 - Alajuela 5 - Cartago 6 – Puntarenas and Guanacaste 7 - Limón

Plus, two other prefixes for mobile phone numbers 3 - TDMA lines 8 – GSM lines

Prefix 00 was reserved for international calls, while prefix 9 was assigned to special numbers, such as 9-1-1.

This numbering system was effective for some time. However, the boom of mobile phone customers since the introduction of GSM around 2000 and the expansion of metropolitan areas caused a serious shortage of available numbers. Thus many GSM-based customers have to use a number starting with 3 and many residents of San Jose province have telephone numbers starting with prefixes other than 2.

Since March 20th, 2008, a renewed numbering system added the prefix 2 for all landlines and 8 for all mobile phone numbers. This system was implemented in order to face the introduction of 1,5 million 3G W-CDMA due to Q1 2009. The transition to 8-digit based was heavily publicized on Costa Rican media. However, the change caused some confusion among many foreigners. Also, all calls dialed using the old 7-digit version of the phone number are automatically redirected to a voice message informing about the change. 8 digit numbers are commonly written two ways: xxxx xxxx xx xx xx xx


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